In the 29 July, 2009 edition of Eureka Street, Australian writer Harry Nicolaides reported on a market at Tachilek in eastern Burma where child pornography is openly sold.  The authorities in Burma and Thailand must know about this market; Mr Nicolaides certainly had no difficulty finding it.  Yet, Mr Nicolaides writes, “unless you are a saffron-robed monk, you will not be searched on the way back across the border into Thailand.”  Nicolaides’ report was reprinted in the December  January issue of Chronicles (which I noted here.)

The Thai police have still done nothing about the trafficking of child pornography from Tachilek through their country.  But let it not be said that they have simply been idle.  No indeed.  In August, four weeks after the publication of the report, they arrested the reporter.  Monday, he was sentenced to three years in prison.  The court did not of course say that Mr Nicolaides was being punished for exposing the Thai government’s complicity in brutal crimes against children the world over.  Instead, the authorities cited a brief passage in an extremely obscure (sold only seven copies) novel Nicolaides self-published almost four years ago, claiming that the fictional character of a Crown Prince described there reflected badly on Thailand’s actual Crown Prince and thus violated the country’s strict laws against lese-majeste. 

Here is an online petition asking for the release of Harry Nicolaides. 

More information about the case, including links to several sites offering downloads of the novel which the Thai authorities cited as the cause of their action against Mr Nicolaides, can be found here. 

On 24 September 2008, a friend of Harry Nicolaides posted a piece about Mr Nicolaides’ arrest.  On 20 January 2009, the same friend posted about Mr Nicolaides’ plea and sentence; I commented on this latter post, bringing up Mr Nicolaides’ investigation into the child pornography industry and asking his friend whether he thought the prosecution might be the Thai government’s way of hushing that issue up.

The man who told the truth

Recently, I posted on Australian writer Harry Nicolaides’ gut-wrenching expose of the complicity of the Thai and Burmese governments in the worldwide market for child pornography.  Now, Harry Nicolaides is in a Thai prison.  The official charge against him is that a novel he wrote and self-published in 2005, a novel which The Economist says sold “fewer than ten copies,” showed disrespect to Thailand’s Crown Prince, a man who is in fact never named in the novel.  Here’s an article on the case from Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, and here’s one from The Sydney Morning Herald about an Australian senator who is calling for action to free Nicolaides.