This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions
Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm and you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am for our open social. Followed by an extended discussion for a half hour. Volunteers please join by 10:30 am.
Thailand notoriously has a lese majesty law to prevent criticism of the monarchy. This has led to way more trouble than you would expect, including frequent coups, thousands of freethinkers forced to flee the country, 10 Thai political refugees recently assassinated (2017-2020), the persecution and dissolution of prodemocracy political parties, and a population of people with liberal views forced to live under dictatorship.
In 2020 mass youth-led protests began and the taboo against criticizing the monarchy has been dramatically broken, leading to freer speech. The protests have died back down due to COVID and repression, but permanent changes in attitude seem to have occurred. This may seem like an obscure topic, but Thailand is in fact a large country (by population it is almost twice as large as Canada), and so what happens there is important. The story is also a great object lesson about the importance of free speech anywhere.
Our featured speaker on this topic will be Ann Norman from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ann has been involved with the Thai pro-democracy and human rights movement since about 2014. For several years, she was Executive Director of the Thai Alliance for Human Rights, and is now on the board of Act4Dem, which is an organization run by a famous Thai dissident, Junya Yimprasert.
Please RSVP on meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/rpgzssydcgbfb/
Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!
This meeting has been recorded: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sw1FE4Vzzc3D3SXWVlEaCFgowbAazlU-/view?usp=sharing