From AP:
Police have charged a prominent Thai political commentator with insulting Thailand’s revered king in a 2007 book — a day after an Australian writer was jailed for three years for a similar offence.
Ji Ungpakorn, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University — one of the country’s leading universities — denied the charges and accused the government of increasingly using Thailand’s harsh lese majeste laws to silence criticism.
“This is a way of shutting up people and silencing opponents, especially opponents to the military dictatorship in 2006,” said Ji, who also writes under the name Giles Ji Ungpakorn.
He said he was being targeted for political reasons because his 2007 book, “A Coup for the Rich,” criticized the military for launching a coup that ousted then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Police filed charges today, Ji said, but must still submit the case to the public prosecutor, who decides whether to bring the case to trial.
All of the recent lese majeste cases are terrible, but this one in particular seems to be a deliberate threat to any intellectuals challenging the current (royalist) regime — Ji Ungpakorn is an internationally respected scholar, who teaches at one of the top two universities in Thailand and is widely read both domestically and in the West. It’s a frightening time in Thailand.
In case you didn’t pick it up, ya Hoss, he’s also one of yours. The party he belongs to, Workers’ Democracy, is part of the IST.