Prosecutors yesterday formally indicted influential former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra under the kingdom’s strict royal insult laws over comments he made nearly a decade ago.
The case against the 74-year-old billionaire, twice elected prime minister and ousted in a 2006 military coup, is one of four before the courts that could unleash fresh political instability in the kingdom.
Thaksin, the patriarch of the Pheu Thai party that leads the coalition government, appeared at Bangkok’s Ratchada Criminal Court accused of lese majeste over an interview he gave to South Korean media in 2015.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Today a state prosecutor indicted Thaksin Shinawatra and the court accepted the case,” the Thai attorney general’s office said in a statement.
Thailand has some of the world’s strictest royal defamation laws protecting King Maha Vajiralongkorn and his close family, with each charge bringing a potential 15-year prison sentence.
Thaksin was also charged under the Computer Crimes Act, which can carry a jail sentence of up to five years.
His lawyer, Winyat Chatmontree, said Thaksin denied all charges and had “no intention of speaking about anyone protected by Article 112” — a reference to the section of the criminal code dealing with lese majeste.
Thaksin was granted bail on a 500,000 baht (US$13,600) bond and ordered not to leave the nation without permission, court officials said.
The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Aug. 19.
Critics say the lese majeste laws are misused to stifle legitimate political debate, and there has been a spike in their use since youth-led anti-government street protests in 2020 and 2021.
Thaksin is the biggest name among the more than 270 people charged under the laws since the protests, according to Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, a legal group that handles many cases.
Thaksin’s case came on the same day the Thai Constitutional Court deliberated on three other cases that could spark a political crisis.
One seeks the ouster of Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin under ethics rules, over the appointment of a Cabinet minister with a criminal conviction. In another, the election commission is seeking the dissolution of the main opposition Move Forward Party (MFP), which won most seats at last year’s general election, but was blocked from forming the government.
The court said it would sit again in the MFP case on July 3 and in the Srettha case on July 10.
In a third case, the Constitutional Court ruled that the ongoing election for a new senate is lawful, throwing out a challenge that sought its postponement or cancelation.
For two decades, Thai politics has been dominated by a struggle between the conservative military pro-royalist elite and progressive parties — first those of Thaksin and his allies, and now the MFP.
Thaksin returned to Thailand in August last year after 15 years in self-exile on the same day Srettha took power in an alliance with pro-military parties previously bitterly opposed to Thaksin and his followers.
The timing seemed to suggest a truce in the long-running tussle as both sides sought to see off the threat posed by the MFP, but the Constitutional Court cases could rip any such deal apart, and Thaksin has hinted that he believes the lese majeste allegations are an establishment ruse to undermine him and Srettha’s government.
“I think the latest developments signal that he is still somewhere between a political mastermind and a hostage,” said political analyst Napon Jatusripitak of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
“He still finds being used as a buffer by the establishment against popular pro-democracy movements coming from below,” Napon said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS