Sinead Ryan
Laws against insulting your country’s dear leader? Let’s hope Leo doesn’t get any ideas –
I’M IN the Netherlands at the moment, and watching my Ps and Qs, I can tell you. The most liberal of European countries when it comes to legalised prostitution and drugs, it’s currently mired in a national conversation about whether to abolish the crime of lèse majesté.
Loosely translated as ‘injury to the king’, it includes insults and general moaning about the monarch and carries a bracing jail sentence of up to five years.
The current ruler, King WillemAlexander, seems like a nice chap (well, I would say that, wouldn’t I), but it’s taken quite seriously if you don’t agree and now it’s dividing the government, with calls for a referendum. If you think it all sounds medieval, think again.
The last case successfully convicted was in 2016. A 44-yearold man got 30 days in prison for calling the king bad things on Facebook. (I can’t repeat them, because, you know, I’m here.)
Plenty of other countries have robust lèse majesté laws, including the Middle Eastern ones you’d expect, but also Poland (with any visiting foreign leaders also automatically protected, as 28 protesters discovered when demonstrating against Vladimir
Putin’s visit in 2005 and swiftly found themselves behind bars).
For 165 years, the UK has had the Treason Felony Act, which threatens to imprison anyone who calls for the abolition of the monarchy. An MP took a spirited case in 2016 to have insults against the EU attached to the bill, but failed, presumably when it was discovered that it would involve dragging the
17.4 million Leave voters to court.
But nowhere is the law taken more seriously than in Thailand. You can spend decades languishing in jail for the merest slight to the king, his family or his pets, as unfortunate factory worker Thanakorn Siripaiboon found out when he was sentenced to 37 years for insulting the king’s dog, Tongdaeng, in 2015. Foreigners had better beware too.
A BBC correspondent was charged with treason for posting a photo of a politician above that of the king in an online article, while Swiss national Oliver Jufer was jailed for 10 years for drunkenly spray-painting a poster of the monarch. I imagine Leo Varadkar is taking note and, if so, insulting his terrible taste in socks and luminous gym gear will be high on the list of offences. So, I’ll get that in now, before it’s made illegal.