BANGKOK: A Thai man was sentenced Wednesday to six years in jail for two Facebook posts about the king that were deemed in breach of the country’s draconian royal defamation law.
The conviction is the latest jail term handed down in an unprecedented lese majeste crackdown launched since arch-royalist generals seized power in a May 2014 coup.
Convictions have sky rocketed since the takeover with record breaking jail sentences, many for social media posts, as authorities broaden their interpretation of the law.
Bangkok Criminal Court said 46-year-old Piya Julkittiphan was convicted for posting two pictures with messages in 2013 that risked making the public “disrespectful or unfaithful” to the monarchy.
“The judge sentenced him to nine years but he has given useful testimony during the investigation so the court commuted one third of that sentence to six years imprisonment,” the court said in its verdict.
The court did not provide details on the content of the posts, as is commonplace in lese majeste convictions.
