24 January 2009
When Harry Met Lese Majeste
Earlier this week ex-concierge, journalist and failed Australian novelist Harry Nicolaides was sentenced to spend the next three years in a dank, crowded cell where he’ll be forced to eat bad curry and share a soiled toilet-hole with 60-odd men. Nicolaides was found guilty of breaching Thailand’s Constitutionally-endorsed lese majeste law, which provides:
“Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen or the Heir-apparent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to 15 years.”
Nicolaides’ crime was to invent a fictional Thai prince who commits pedestrian royal impropriety of the Mills & Boon genus, in a novel he self-published in 2005. The offending passage reads:
“From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives major and minor with a coterie of concubines for entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumoured that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever”
While self-publishing a highly pretentious novel called Verisimilitude should arguably be a crime, Nicolaides effort to write a “post-modern, allegorical twist on the timeless fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes” was utterly harmless to the entire world beyond his poor friends who purchased the book and then had to find something nice to say about it to Nicolaides. The book sold only seven copies.
Nicolaides was living in Thailand at the time, and in the hyper-cautious manner of a former concierge he actually took the step of posting the book to the Thai Ministry of Culture, the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs and something called the Bureau of the Royal Household. He heard nothing from the Thai authorities and flew in and out of Thailand a number of times before his surprise arrest at Bangkok airport on 31 August 2008.
Nicolaides was denied bail and spent five and a half months in a cell packed with royalty-loving Thai criminals, waiting for trial. Looking like a junkie AIDS-victim, Nicolaides faced his accusers in chains and pled guilty to the charge of disparaging Thailand’s royal family. He was sentenced to six years, reduced to three for the guilty plea.
Putting aside the massive injustice of this entire debacle (which I’ll get to), the legal issue that jumps straight out here is this: assuming that the terms of Thailand’s lese majeste law set out above are right (allowing for the follies of Wikipedia and translation), Nicolaides arguably isn’t in breach. The law requires a person to defame, insult or threaten “the King, Queen or the Heir-apparent”. The subject of the offending passage from Verisimilitude is a fictional character. Plainly, regardless of how insulting the passage is, it isn’t expressly directed to any of the three classes of protected royal.
The lawerly response to this point is that what is written about a fictional character can still result in the defamation of a real person (the test for defamation in Australia being hideously imprecise, i.e., would a reasonable person be likely to think less of the defamed person, by reason of the defamatory imputation?). Further, there might be precedent in Thai courts for a broad reading of the law. But my point is that it’s arguable, and, on my scant, half-arsed research of the matter, I’d prefer to be arguing the plain meaning – the law protects three classes of royals from defamation, none of those royals are defamed in Nicolaides’ book, therefore, he isn’t in breach. But Nicolaides pled guilty.
He probably did so because the Thai King, a stand-up guy by the name of Bhumibol, generally hands out pardons to farang persecuted under Thailand’s lese majeste law. Even a drunken Swiss wannabe-Banksy, who was sentenced to ten years for defacing a number of portraits of King Bhumibol in Chiang Mai, got the royal pardon within a month. But this isn’t to say that lese majeste doesn’t have royal assent in Thailand. The King has gone as far as publicly acknowledging his own fallibility but has never expressly rejected the law, and Thais who commit outrages such as refusing to stand for the national anthem continue to have the keys to their cells thrown away.
Nicolaides’ lawyer is Mark Dean SC, a barrister out of Melbourne (aside: whether Dean ever utilised Nicolaides’ concierge services, which by Nicolaides’ own admission included regular contact with the escort industry, will probably never be known). My guess is that Dean advised Nicolaides to plead guilty and cross his fingers for the royal pardon, but this must have been a tough call. If the pardon doesn’t come, Dean might have to live with the fact that his advice helped put a potentially innocent client behind bars.
But whatevs. The irrepressible fact of the matter is that lese majeste is a hideous atavistic fucking blight. Any law that limits freedom of speech in this way deserves no respect. Not even to the extent that it is the law of a democratic sovereign nation with a different culture to our own. Because it is plainly wrong. Inevitably, laws like these truly serve, in the words of one Thai intellectual, “to bolster a conservative elite well beyond the walls of the palace” by persecuting those who would question it. And when a law results in personal tragedy like that afflicting Nicolaides (or Chotisak Onsoong, who refused to stand for the national anthem) it becomes only more reprehensible.
No related posts.
Ben says:
Dick says:
Because it serves to violently limit the freedoms of a population (wrong) through the restriction of freedom of speech (wrong) resulting in personal tragedies of the prison rape/sanity destroying ilk (so wrong).
Genocide too has had the support of the majority of people of countless democratic nations…
And, as far as I can tell, we’re all born with the freedom to say whatever, whenever. Ever heard a three year old blurt out something hilariously inappropriate? It’s other people, and institutions, and governments, and violence, that limit that freedom.
goozang says:
“humans aren’t born with any clear freedoms to do or say what they want when they want”
Very strange claim.
Clearly everyone is born free to do anything they choose. Even god says so.
Ben says:
Yeah I see your point, but I was talking about freedoms in a legal sense – not a literal sense.
To put it another way, yes we are all free to do what we want (within the laws of, um, physics I guess). However, other people are also free to do whatever they want to sanction us for our actions. Thus, we were never really free in the first place.
So, when we are born into this world, we are not born with any true inalienable freedoms to do or say whatever we want. There is no overarching body (like a sexy team of superheroes or whatnot) that will protect our freedom of speech from being stifled by governments, the church, whomever.
Kids these days (haha) are brought up by American TV which tells them about the importance of the 1st Amendment and freedom of speech. But in Australia there is no such thing. No First Amendment. No freedom of speech. In the world, any such freedom of speech is artificial and it can continue only so long as people respect a piece of paper.
Dick is right – it is other people that limit our freedom to do or say whatever. But so what?
Re: Dick’s genocide argument – this isn’t the same thing. Reading your article, it appears as though Mr Nicolaides knew that the law existed, knew that there was a clear risk in publishing this material and did it anyways. The law was passed by a valid government – and he knowingly broke it.
Yes it is a sad case – but you’re saying the law is plainly wrong and I’m not sure I agree.
Why is the law plainly wrong? My understand of Thailand might be incorrect, but I think the monarchy and the government are separate, right? So this isn’t a case of political speech being restricted. Couldn’t a similar law be passed by an Australian government? Sure, they’d be voted out straight away but in theory it’s possible.
If the law was created by their democratically elected government and still (I assume) carries the support of the Thai people – why is it wrong?
As far as I can tell, humans aren’t born with any clear freedoms to do or say what they want when they want :)