The European Parliament Should Be Careful With Thailand’s Lèse-Majesté—Or Change The Way It Talks About It.

Notes On Human Rights

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On March 13, the European Parliament passed a sensible enough resolution that condemned the Thai government’s decision earlier this month to blandish Beijing by deporting more than 40 Uighurs back to China. Yet the resolution also squirreled in a call for Bangkok to “amend or repeal Article 112 and other repressive laws to guarantee the right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and political participation,” a demand for an amnesty “to all MPs and activists prosecuted or imprisoned under lese-majesty provisions and other repressive laws,” and a request the European Commission to “leverage FTA negotiations to press Thailand to reform repressive laws, particularly the lese-majesty law.”

The Uyghur issue is relatively straightforward. Bangkok knows it has erred, though it is still working through several drafts on a justification that would allow it to say something other than just, “China told us to do it.”

Parliament’s opining on lèse-majesté (not for the first time) is less straightforward. The time to really have pushed this was between 2014 and 2023, when the military junta in Bangkok was using Article 112 much more freely and when Brussels wasn’t in negotiations with Thailand over a free-trade agreement. Nothing short of a coup this year will disrupt those negotiations.

More to the point, lèse-majesté is no longer what it once was, at least in terms of public consciousness. The spell was finally broken at the 2023 general elections. For decades, no one really knew what most Thais thought about it—mostly because the law is intended to prevent them from expressing an opinion about it. Yet, some 38 percent of the electorate voted for the Future Forward party in 2023. It finished in first place after running very, very vocally on a platform of wanting to reform lèse-majesté. Indeed, it wasn’t as though Future Forward whispered its opinions. Everyone knew that the party wanted to amend the law, if not outright repel it. The reactionary and militarist newspapers banged on for months before the election about how this was a threat to the entire monarchy. Some even tried to get Future Forward taken off the ballot because of it. Yet it finished in first place at the polls.

In second place was Pheu Thai, which was internally split over this issue, with some politicians voicing support for reform, although it finally got down from the fence post-election when it distanced itself from reform when it needed reactionary parties to form a coalition government. Even after Future Forward was denied a chance to form a government after the elections (because of its stance on monarchy), and even after the party was forcibly dissolved last August (because of its stance on monarchy), the People’s Party, its successor party, remains the most popular party in the country (perhaps because of its stance on monarchy). More to the point, the reactionaries made a major error. Future Forward was banned last August by the Constitutional Court on the premise that its campaign proposal to amend the royal defamation amounted to an attempt to overthrow the nation’s constitutional monarch. But as I wrote last year: “Aren’t these voters, then, guilty by association? Hasn’t the highest court in the land just opined that a large plurality of Thais are knowingly voting for a seditious party? Isn’t the Constitutional Court’s ruling the most damning indictment of royalism?”

What doesn’t help, though, is if reform seems like something that foreigners are forcing upon Bangkok, especially if at the pointy end of a trade deal that Thailand could really do with right now. (Certain Southeast Asians tend to see Europeans badgering them about human rights in the same way that Europeans see J.D Vance hectoring them about free speech—"Who are you to show up and lecture us? And, anyway, who are you!?”) At the very least, the European Parliament could, next time, frame the appeal in terms of Thai demands. One should bolt a hundred yards when someone blethers on about the “will of the people,” yet maybe a slight semantic adjustment to the next resolution, something like: “Calls on the Commission to leverage FTA negotiations to press Thailand to reform repressive laws, particularly the lese-majesty law, that significant numbers of Thais voted in favor of reforming at the 2023 general elections.”

The European Parliament might also consider lobbying European states to abolish their lèse-majesté laws, too. Better still, include this in any future resolution about lèse-majesté in Thailand. (If not, you’re asking someone else to do something you won’t do yourself.) I count Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden among the dozens of countries with lèse-majesté still on the books—and not merely archaic books long forgotten in some dusty cellar. To take one example: The case of Pablo Hasél, a Spanish rapper still in prison for insulting the King, has attracted quite a bit of international attention.

“You first” isn’t always a bad way of framing an argument, and reaching for whataboutery doesn’t necessarily mean you’re holding a weak hand. Certainly not when the argument being made sounds a lot like, “lèse-majesté in Thailand is repressive, yet it isn’t in Europe.” The Scandinavians routinely top the indexes of countries with the best free speech, but it would take at least ten minutes to explain why Denmark can do so while possessing lèse-majesté—and who has ten minutes for a reasonable political conversation these days? It takes less than ten seconds for Thai reactionaries to shoot back with accusations of hypocrisy.

Worse, those reactionaries might stumble across a valid point if they were to argue that by not also referencing lèse-majesté in Europe, the European Parliament is essentially saying (1) that lèse-majesté isn’t repressive in Europe but it is in Thailand or (2) that lèse-majesté is repressive in Europe but it’s more repressive in Thailand. The risk is running an argument not about a specific law but about Thailand’s political system being fundamentally repressive. The subtext: “We Europeans are enlightened enough not to abuse our lèse-majesté laws, but you others aren’t.” Anyway, the European Parliament isn’t wrong to focus on this issue, but its tone could do with some tweaking.