Scared of a laugh

re: "Military pulls bail for Pai Dao Din" (BP, July 28)

Dear editor,
So Thailand's international human rights award winner Jatupat Boonpattararaksa (Pai Dao Din) remains in prison "because he did not delete the shared article from his Facebook page, and posted photos that allegedly mocked the authority of the state" (Bangkok Post, July 28).

The thousands of others who shared the article have probably not deleted it either. Nor has Thai rule of law attacking informed opinion given any reason why links to articles whose truth has not been questioned should be deleted, except that under Thai rule of law telling truths about Thai affairs can constitute a serious criminal offense. Good people do not hold truth seeking or speaking to be bad morals, quite the contrary.

As to the absurdly false claim that just rule of law can imprison anyone who "mocked the authority of the state," Harvard University's renowned Steven Pinker perhaps puts it best when he writes that "satire and ridicule, even when puerile and tasteless, are terrifying to autocrats and protected by democracies" (The Boston Globe, "Why free speech is fundamental", 2015, January 27).

By accepting the consequences of his acts, with no hint of running away, Pai Dao Din proves himself a worthy recipient of the  2017 Gwangju Prize for Human Rights as he follows in the morally exemplary tradition of those branded criminals by unjust law as Socrates, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the other true patriots in the long line of those who have suffered for the good morals that found democracy,

 Felix Qui

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on August 1, 2017, under the title "Scared of a laugh" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1297783/up-in-the-air