Another battle over the truth is being fought in Thailand.

Robert Amsterdam, the international lawyer working for fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, has submitted a lengthy petition to the International Criminal Court in the Hague alleging that Thailand’s government and military committed crimes against humanity during the suppression of “Red Shirt” mass protests in Bangkok in April and May last year. The document produced by Amsterdam & Peroff LLP goes far beyond just setting out the evidence of criminal conduct. It presents an alternative history of the past decade in Thailand that is radically at odds with the official narrative, and which has been made available online in both English and Thai, as a challenge to the government’s version of the truth. Central to its argument is the incendiary accusation that the official version of events is not merely dishonest or incomplete, but that it has been constructed with the help of a prolonged campaign of systematic and deliberate deception, with key events staged or manipulated to obscure the truth of what was really going on and create a carefully choreographed fiction.

Continue reading →