Release Pai XIII

The Nation reports that the activist Jatuphat Boonpattararaksa, singled out from thousands of others for a lese majeste charge related to a BBC story on the king, has been refused bail.

We think this is perhaps the eighth time he’s been refused.

The courts and the regime have decided that this young man is not just to be unfairly fitted up for a “crime,” but must be psychologically tortured and denied constitutional rights. The barbarians are not at the gates, they are running the place.

We are not suggesting that his case is unique. Far from it. Almost all lese majeste detainees are treated as guilty from the day they are arrested and very few ever get bail.

The state’s minions opposing bail argued, again, “that Jatupat had been accused of being disrespectful to state authorities and could manipulate the evidence if released.” Such claims are unnecessary as the courts have no intention of releasing him.

Meanwhile, as Jatuphat has been  awarded the 2017 Gwangju Prize for Human Rights from the South Korea-based May 18 Memorial Foundation, it may be his mother who represents him and receives the award.

The regime is so mean and twisted, that it can’t even let this event go by without sniping and showing how warped the justice system is.

The letter reproduced here is said to have come from the Thai Ambassador in Seoul and sent to the May 18 Memorial Foundation.

Not only does it not specify why the letter is written – just being nasty – but while claiming that Jatuphat is getting a fair trial, which is simply a fabrication, it also states that he’s guilty. That is the ambassador, who heads a seemingly inactive embassy (there’s nothing done since February on the website when we looked at it, declares Jatuphat guilty of crimes.

Now we know that the unfair trial will find him guilty, but the dopey ambassador should probably not declare him guilty and then say a fair trial is underway.

Just for good measure, Ambassador Sarun Charoensuwan then includes a paragraph of lies. He states that Thailand supports and values freedoms of expression, assembly and association. That’s completely untrue. He then appears to suggest that Thailand’s military dictatorship is a democracy.  Finally, he emerges from this stupor of lies and adds the rider that, of course, these lies are only good if they are considered in the context of the junta’s laws and decrees. That, of course, means that none exist.

We are sure that the folks at the Foundation are fully aware that military dictatorships are built on repression and lies. We are also pretty sure that they understand that such regimes demand “representatives” who are either stupid or so ideologically attuned to Fascism that they just blurt out lies as a matter of duty.