IF Thailand wants to be real democracy – as its various political leaders on all sides of the spectrum insist it should become – then it must allow genuine freedom of speech, and not the half-baked version we have now. This means lifting restrictions on all those institutions that currently forbid any kind of criticism. The country has enough laws to deal with libel and slander, along with some fairly harsh penalties. These are sufficient to make people extremely wary of any kind of defamation without resorting to blanker curbs on people’s honest opinions.
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