3 years of PPT
As was the situation on the the second anniversary of Political Prisoners in Thailand, this third anniversary is not one that is cause for much celebration. Indeed, we are late even mentioning our anniversary because the lese majeste situation in Thailand is so controversial that we have concentrated on our posting.
When we began Political Prisoners in Thailand on 21 January 2009, we hoped it would be a temporary endeavor. Instead, three years later, we are still at it. We do not anticipate being able to end our work anytime soon.
Initially, we saw a gap in the work that existing news and human rights organizations were doing in terms of keeping track of the various political detention cases, which at the time were all related to charges under Article 112 (the lese majeste law) and the 2007 Computer Crimes Act. In the years since then the cases under these two instruments have grown exponentially, harsh sentences have been handed down for the utterance of a few words and even for presumption about a few texted words, and new categories of political prisoners have emerged. We also declared, from the beginning, that we wanted to draw attention to human rights abuses and they are still all too common.
The most striking events in the current political crisis in Thailand have been the 19 September 2006 coup and the red shirt uprisings of 2009 and 2010 and their violent suppression. They have been accompanied by an expansion of repression and censorship.
The other side of expanding repression is the determination for dissidence and the bravery and willingness of some to take risks to expose injustice. Nitirat is the most recent example. Our work supporting these dissidents will continue.
We thought readers might be interested in some statistics on PPT over the past three years. To date we (auspiciously) had more than 888,000 page views at our main site and the mirror we use when PPT is blocked. Average page views increased between 2010 and 2011, and average nearly 1,000 a day. Not surprisingly, the months of heaviest traffic were April and May 2010. Even so, total page views increased in 2011. We posted earlier on the most popular pages/posts.
We want to thank our readers for sticking with us through all the attempts by the Abhisit Vejjajiva and the Yingluck Shinawatra censors to block PPT. We trust that we remain useful and relevant and we appreciate the many emails of support and advice we receive.
The lese majeste and computer crimes laws must be repealed.
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