Australian journalist ‘prepared to go to jail’ for a free media in Thailand

Veteran Australian journalist Alan Morison has said he is prepared to go to jail over criminal libel charges brought by the Royal Thai Navy to stand up for press freedom in Thailand.

Morison, who worked for The Melbourne Herald in the 1960s and has worked at newspapers in London, as well as CNN.com and The Brunei Times, says the Royal Thai Navy has failed to understand the workings of a democracy by taking legal action over an article published in July.

The Navy allege a paragraph in the article published in the Phuketwan, which summarised a Reuters report about the smuggling of Rohingya migrants, harms its reputation and has filed charges under both the defamation act and the Computer Crimes Act – two laws opposed by human rights activists.

Morison told Mumbrella Asia: “Instead of making a telephone call to explain the problem or issuing a media statement, the Royal Thai Navy sued us five months later over a paragraph we ran word for word from Reuters. The paragraph does not even mention the captain who sued, or the Royal Thai Navy. Reuters is being sued too, say the police, but even more slowly than we are.”