Kangaroo court’s revenge

Prachatai reports that Wachira (last name withheld) has had his petition to appeal to the the Supreme Court rejected, meaning he now goes to prison for hacking the Constitutional Court’s website in 2021.

On 14 November 2021, Wachira, a 33 year-old from Ubon Ratchathani, was “arrested and charged under the Computer Crimes Act with wrongfully accessing a computer system, wrongfully accessing computer data with specific security measures; damaging, destroying, or revising someone else’s computer data; and blocking, deferring, obstructing or interfering with the computer system of someone else and causing it to fail.”

In his alleged hack of the Constitutional Court website on 11 November 2021 he renamed the politicized instrument of establishment rule “Kangaroo Court.”

That seems to us like an entirely appropriate moniker for this court. After all, it was hacked immediately after it had come up with a ludicrous ruling “that calling for monarchy reform is to be considered treason.” That is, ludicrous for all those who are not die-hard, brain dead ultra-royalists.

The court of twits’ site’s content was replaced with a video of the song “Guillotine” performed by the American hip-hop band Death Grips.

Wachira  was found guilty by the Criminal Court in 2022. It sentenced him to three years in prison, reduced to 1 year and 6 months since he pleaded guilty. He was also ordered to pay 87,227 baht in damages to the Constitutional Court after its site was down for several days. The Appeals Court upheld the verdict.

Thailand’s (in)justice system protects royalists.