January 18, 2016•Update: January 18, 2016
By Max Constant
BANGKOK
A Thai court formally indicted Monday a British migrant rights defender over a report detailing alleged abuses of workers’ rights at a fruit processing company.
“I have been formally indicted and I pleaded ‘not guilty’ to all charges,” Andy Hall told Anadolu Agency after being charged with criminal defamation and violation of Thailand’s computer crime law at the Bangkok South Criminal Court.
“Seven prosecution witnesses will be heard in the coming months, as well as 33 defense witnesses,” he said after the hearing attended by representatives of a European Union delegation and the United Kingdom and Finland embassies.
Hall, whose passport was confiscated by the court Wednesday, was granted permission Monday to travel on a case-by-case basis and was released on bail.
If convicted on the charges, he faces a maximum penalty of seven years imprisonment.
Hall has been facing charges since the publication in 2013 of a research report, commissioned by Finland-based watchdog Finnwatch, on the work conditions of Myanmar migrant workers in a fruit processing factory owned by Natural Fruit, the largest Thai company in the sector.
The report based on interviews with factory workers incriminated the company for its poor treatment of migrant workers, including wages below the legal minimum, long work hours and confiscation of passports.
The criminal trial is one of four cases – two of them criminal and two civil – filed by Natural Fruit against Hall under Thailand’s severe defamation laws.
An earlier criminal case was filed against him in 2013 based on an interview he gave, but both the criminal court and appeals court dismissed it for “lack of disclosure of all evidence by the prosecution to the defense”.
Natural Fruit is studying the possibility of a final appeal at the Supreme Court level.
In the two civil court cases against Hall, Natural Fruit requests that he pay $11 million to compensate for alleged damage to the company’s reputation.
In a statement published last week, Finnwatch said, “the cases brought against Hall have been widely criticized as judicial harassment and an attempt to silence a human rights defender.”
It underlined that criminal defamation charges “also breach rights to freedom of expression.”
