Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s former Prime Minister, was cleared of a royal defamation allegation by a court on Friday, in a case that could have put him to prison for 15 years.
His lawyer, Winyat Chatmontree, confirmed the acquittal result, as did the Bangkok Criminal Court in a news release.
The legislation punishes defaming the monarchy, often known as lese majeste, with three to fifteen years in prison.
It is one of the strictest such laws in the world, and it is increasingly being utilized in Thailand to punish government critics.
The legal aid group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights has said that since early 2020, more than 270 people — many of them student activists — have been charged with violating the law.
The court’s news release said it had found the witnesses and evidence were too weak to support conviction.
Thaksin was originally charged in 2016 over remarks he made a year earlier to journalists in South Korea.
The case was not pursued at that time because he was in exile and the necessary legal procedures could not be completed.
Thais have long been accustomed to sudden changes of government due to military coups, numbering more than a dozen since the 1930s. But in the past two decades, they have increasingly seen such changes imposed by the courts, which have ousted four prime ministers and dissolved three election-winning political parties, often on narrow technical grounds.
In most cases, the targets were viewed as challengers to the traditional royalist establishment, whose most powerful defenders are the army and the courts.
