How four blog posts landed Australian writer in Thai jail
It was late September, and as the aging Australian journalist-blogger with 7,400 subscribers prepared to board a flight from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, he was stopped by a pair of Thai immigration officers.
“Are you Murray Hunter?” someone asked. It was.
They announced that he would not go to Hong Kong that day. The retired academic and long-time resident of Thailand was actually marked as a wanted man. The police would pick him up soon.
Hunter, originally from Melbourne, was shaken.
“Can you imagine being at Sydney airport or Melbourne airport and you’re about to fly on holiday and the federal police stop you and say, ‘I’m sorry, there’s an arrest warrant for you,'” he said.
Police officers put him in a car and took him to the holding cell at Bangkok’s Yannawa police station, where they took all his belongings and his passport.
“Then when the cell door slams, it’s a shock,” he said. “I thought no one would be interested in my story. I only have a blog. I’m in a foreign country. I’m on my own.”
The night spent in jail before being released on bail the next day was the beginning of a 15-week ordeal – trials, nightmares and a daily grind of anxiety – that ended this week with what this byline describes as a mix of humiliation, regret and relief.
His alleged crime was writing.
Thailand is particularly proficient in prosecuting defamation in the following matters: Your Majesty – snubs towards the royal family. But Hunter did not denigrate the monarchy. He was not even alleged to have slandered anyone from Thailand.
What made his case stand out, which attracted the reform attention of a powerful Thai senate committee, was that Hunter, 68, faced prosecution in Thai courts for disrupting a branch of the Malaysian government and spent eight years in a Thai prison. Rights groups in Thailand and elsewhere called it “transnational oppression.”
Four allegedly defamatory articles published on the blog site Substack in April 2024 accused the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, the country’s statutory media regulator, of blocking sites that criticized the Malaysian government and its president for having a conflict of interest.
Bashing the Malaysian government for trying to silence critics was nothing new among writers and freedom watchers. “Authorities, including the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, invoked the law to target individuals with significant reach and leveraged legal action as a chilling signal to broader digital audiences,” the Center for Independent Journalism wrote in a detailed 2024 report on freedom of expression in Malaysia.
But Hunter was a vulnerable target.
“There is no media organization behind me,” he said. “I am a retired individual.”
Weeks before his arrest in Bangkok, a Malaysian court found Hunter liable for defamation in the case in which he claimed he was never given any information. He now faced possible conviction and imprisonment in Thailand.
Following a 12-hour mediation session in a Bangkok court on Monday in which neither the defendant nor the accuser spoke Thai, Hunter agreed to send an apology to the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission and to remove a number of critical blogs from Substack.
“All that writing that goes down, there’s humiliation there,” he said. “And there are people who say, ‘You gave up.’ You know, I wish they were in my position. But there are also a lot of people who are very supportive.”
“At 68, I just want to get away from them [MCMC] grips.”
Pornchai Witayalerdpan, a Thai politician and member of the Senate foreign relations committee, said transnational pressure was a “matter of record” in Southeast Asia.
“With or without formal mutual agreements, ASEAN countries appear to be acting as proxy enforcers for each other’s political censorship, which contradicts the ASEAN human rights declaration,” he said.
The way the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission got hold of Hunter was through a “loophole” in Thailand’s criminal defamation laws. The senator said a person acting on behalf of the commission filed a complaint alleging that he had accessed Hunter’s online articles while he was in Thailand, allowing local police and prosecutors to file charges under section 328 of the Thai Penal Code.
“Technically, the complaint was filed by a representative of the MCMC acting as the injured party, rather than the government taking a diplomatic stance. So, this is akin to one person filing a defamation case against another person,” he said.
“The legal mechanism that makes this possible lies in the interpretation of the ‘venue of crime’ in relation to online defamation… as a result, a representative of a foreign organization can claim jurisdiction in Thailand by accessing the alleged defamatory content in Bangkok.”
Pornchai warned that the precedent set by Hunter’s arrest meant that any writer, whether a professional journalist or not, could be arrested in Thailand for writing critically about foreign governments or their institutions.
“I think this is very damaging to Thailand’s image as a country that wants to protect human rights and freedom of expression,” the senator said.
“I am very concerned that Thailand is being used as a center of transnational repression, where our justice system is used to silence critics of foreign regimes.”
Pornchai wants changes to Thai law to prevent a case like Hunter’s from coming up again. This is not only true in terms of human rights. He said it was Thai taxpayers who covered the costs.
The governments of Thailand and Malaysia did not respond to requests for comment. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade also declined to comment on the case and its outcome, citing confidentiality reasons.
Hunter remained in Thailand with his partner. Although he could not discuss the full details of the mediation, he was hoping to reactivate his blog and archive, which had been inaccessible for several years in Malaysia, long before charges were filed against him in Thailand.
Zach Hope is a Southeast Asia correspondent. He is a former reporter for the Brisbane Times.Connect via email.
