Thailand closes 5,000 sites in three months to protect the king's image

Authorities Thai blocked during the last three months access to over 5,000 sites or sites of Internet to consider grievances containing the monarchy, police said this week.

Blocking these web pages is part of the campaign by the Thai government to protect the image of King Bhumibol Adulyadej and members of the Royal Family, which is also covered by the law of "treason" .

The police spokesman, General Piya Utayo, said at a news conference that the special brigade closed the thousands of locations in the first quarter for "inappropriate and insulting" , but said, without giving figures, the number of pages with this content type has declined over the previous year.

In November last year, the Thai authorities sought help from the social network Facebook to eliminate over 10,000 sites with content deemed offensive to the monarchy, as stated by the Ministry of Information and Communication.

The number of prosecutions brought by the alleged crime of "treason" has soared in recent years to more than several hundred, when the 90's barely a dozen denounced as Group Awareness Section 112, organization that campaigns against the use of this law.

Several groups of group intellectual Thais have spoken against the law of "treason" and order that can be discussed constructively on the monarchy, but the government has rejected any reform in this regard

Since entering into force until January 2011, the number of sites blocked by the courts using the Act, amounted to 75,000 , including 57,330 for contents against the monarchy, according to a report by the Thammasat University in Bangkok.