Thai authorities yesterday released under a royal amnesty six political prisoners, including a woman sentenced to a record 43-year prison sentence for defaming Thailand’s monarchy.
The 69-year-old former civil servant Anchan Preelert walked free after serving 8 years and 4 months in prison under Article 112 of the Thai penal code, generally known as the lese-majeste law.
According to the Associated Press, she was “was embraced by friends and family and received bouquets of flowers from supporters” when she walked out of Bangkok’s Central Women’s Correctional Institution.”
“I feel immensely happy. I want to be free for a long time because I’m getting old and my time is running short now,” Anchan told reporters. “For over eight years, it felt like it was all my life, it was bitter because it was not my place to be.”
According to advocacy groups iLaw and Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, Anchan was one of six political prisoners freed under a July 29 pardon on the occasion of King Vajiralongkorn’s birthday. Also released were hip-hop artist Thanayut “Book” Na Ayutthaya, better known as Eleven Finger, who was serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for the possession of bomb-making materials, including smoke bombs and ping-pong balls, and the youth activist Siraphop “Khanun” Phumpuengphut, who was sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly insulting the king during a speech at a political rally in 2020.
Thailand’s lese-majeste law criminalizes any comment deemed critical of the king, the royal family, or the institution of the monarchy, and carries a punishment of up to 15 years in prison. Critics of the law say that it has been applied very broadly in order to silence dissenting voices. According to Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, more than 280 people have been charged with lese-majeste over the last five years, many of them were leaders or participants in the youth-dominated protest movement of 2020 and 2021, which featured unusually open criticism of the power of the monarchy and calls for its reform.
Anchan was arrested earlier, in 2015, and charged with lese-majeste after sharing online audio clips of an underground podcast host known as DJ Banpodj, a fierce critic of the monarchy. In January 2021, she was sentenced to 87 years in prison: three years for each of the 29 counts of lese-majeste that she faced. This was later reduced to 43 years and 6 months after she admitted her “guilt.”
At the time, Anchan’s sentence was the longest ever handed down under Article 112, although this was superseded in 2024 when Mongkol Thirakot, 32, was sentenced to 50 years imprisonment over Facebook posts deemed insulting to the monarchy. At the time of Anchan’s conviction, Sunai Phasuk of the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said that the sentence sent “a spine-chilling signal that not only criticisms of the monarchy won’t be tolerated, but they will also be severely punished.”
Yesterday’s releases came a week after Thailand’s influential former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was acquitted of lese-majeste, in a case relating to an interview he conducted with a South Korean newspaper in 2015. Judges at the Bangkok Criminal Court ruled that the witnesses and evidence against him were too weak to support a conviction. Then, on Tuesday, the same court acquitted Piyarat Chongthep, a lawmaker from the opposition People’s Party, of lese-majeste for posting a message on Facebook that criticized the dispersal of protests in 2020 and linked it to King Vajiralongkorn. In this instance, the judges argued that prosecutors failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Piyarat had personally posted the message himself.
Whether these pardons and acquittals mark the advent of a new and more tolerant view toward Article 112 prosecutions, on either the part of the judiciary or the monarchy itself, remains unclear.