Activist charged with royal defamation over three-finger salute at graduation

Songpol “Yajai” Sonthirak, an activist from the Thalufah group, has been summoned by the police in Khon Kaen on a royal defamation complaint filed against him by a royalist group leader now running as MP candidate for the Thai Pakdee Party.

Songpol “Yajai” Sonthirak

Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR) said that cause of the complaint against Songpol is probably because he flashed the three-finger “Hunger Games” salute after receiving his degree certificate from Princess Sirindhorn, King Vajiralongkorn’s younger sister, during Khon Kaen University’s graduation ceremony on 20 December 2022.

The three-finger salute is a well-known resistance symbol in Thailand, having been used by activists protesting against the junta after the 2014 military coup and by pro-democracy protesters since 2020.

According to Voice TV, Khon Kaen University paused its live broadcast of the graduation ceremony while Songpol and subsequent graduates from the Faculty of Law were receiving their certificates, and did not allow comments on the live broadcast after it resumed.

In a January 2023 interview with Prachatai, Songpol said his action was not planned, but he did it because he wanted to take the few seconds he had in front of the Princess to communicate his demands directly to someone in the royal family. 

Songpol said his demands were to remove then-Prime Minister Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha from office, amend the Constitution, and repeal the royal defamation law. He said he left the stage and went back to his seat afterwards, and did not see if or how the Princess or her guards reacted. Nevertheless, he was sure he did not cause problems as the graduation ceremony continued normally.

“I believe that displaying the three-finger salute is not an offence, and I feel that doing this might lead to some changes more than (thinking about) the consequences. When I walked up [onto the stage], I felt that it was really my space. It was the people’s space where I can do this,” he said.

Songpol said that, after the end of the first half ceremony, a lecturer from the Faculty of Law came to ask him if he would be doing anything else and asked that he not take any action during the next half. He also said that after the ceremony ended, a lecturer and plainclothes officer spoke to his parents, who were waiting outside the auditorium, and made them sign a note acknowledging that his action was inappropriate.

Despite recent trends of university graduates boycotting graduation ceremonies, which are often long, complicated, and presided over by a member of the royal family, Songpol said he participated in the ceremony at the wish of his family, since he is the first person in his family to graduate from university. Nevertheless, Songpol said he felt the ceremony was not related to a graduate’s university life, and that he would prefer to receive his certificate from his parents to show his gratitude to the people who got him where he is.

At the very least, he said, universities should allow students to have a say in what they want their graduation ceremony to be like, since many graduates feel that they are not part of the ceremony but are only doing their duty,s when what they really want is to be with their families.

The complaint against Songpol was filed by Kamon Kitkasiwat, leader of a royalist group in Khon Kaen, who is now running as an MP candidate for the royalist Thai Pakdee Party.

The party was founded by Warong Dechgitvigrom, former doctor and Democrat Party MP, who leads a royalist group of the same name, to counter anti-establishment groups and to protect the monarchy. One of the policies it proposes in its campaign for the upcoming general election is to amend the royal defamation law so that, instead of covering on the current King, Queen, and heir to the throne, it also covers past monarchs in the Chakri dynasty and all princes and princesses even if they are not the heir. The party also proposed to make insulting the monarchy as a whole an offence under the royal defamation law.

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