Office of the Prime Minister
Government House, Dusit, Bangkok 10300
Dear Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra,
On behalf of Amnesty International, I am writing to inform you of our new report, “Being Ourselves is Too Dangerous”: Digital Violence and the Silencing of Women and LGBTI activists in Thailand. This new research documents the experiences of LGBTI and women human rights defenders in Thailand who have endured technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TfGBV), including unlawful targeted digital surveillance with Pegasus and online harassment.
The report is primarily based on in-depth interviews with 40 women and LGBTI activists, including many young activists and those living in the country’s Malay Muslim-majority southern border provinces. Among the 40 interviewees, Amnesty International interviewed nine of the 15 women activists confirmed to have been targeted in 2020 and 2021 by Pegasus, the highly invasive spyware developed by Israeli cybertechnology company NSO Group.
The research shows that this targeted digital surveillance disproportionately impacted women and LGBTI activists, as it created a uniquely gendered fear that the breach of their private data could lead to further blackmailing, harassment and discrimination. Technical and circumstantial evidence, combined with the NSO Group’s policy of selling its products exclusively to governments, strongly point to the involvement of one or more Thai state actors’ use of Pegasus to target HRDs. Amnesty International also spoke with six women and LGBTI HRDs who were among the 44 individuals in Thailand that reported having received a notification from Meta of “government-backed or sophisticated attacker alerts” via their personal Facebook accounts’ support inbox.
Furthermore, Amnesty International found that state and non-state actors have routinely used online spaces to attack, intimidate and discredit women and LGBTI HRDs at least since the 2014 military coup. These attacks included gendered disinformation, hateful and abusive speech laced with misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic language; and sexualized content that was degrading against women and LGBTI people. Amnesty International also found inadequate responses by both judicial and non-judicial mechanisms to provide an effective remedy, including access to information, justice and reparations for the HRDs who endured TfGBV.
Additionally, this research found that digital violence created a chilling effect among many women and LGBTI activists who began self-censoring and, in some cases, disengaging from human rights work altogether. Some activists also suffered from serious mental health repercussions, including paranoia, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. This has been felt strongly in the southern border provinces, where LGBTI activists avoided using social media platforms for their activism for fear of reprisals due to anti-LGBTI hostilities in their communities.
Our evidence also demonstrates that in all the documented instances, the Thai government failed to protect the women and LGBTI HRDs from the violations of their human rights caused by TfGBV, including their rights to freedom from violence, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, privacy and access to justice. The Thai state is bound under International Human Rights Law (IHRL) to respect, protect and fulfil these rights.
Amnesty International publishes this research in the context of ongoing human rights violations in Thailand against individuals, including human rights defenders, who were involved in peaceful protests or have expressed their opinions online since the 2014 military coup. Upon learning of these findings, we hope that your government will emphasise to the Thai authorities that guarantees for the exercise of human rights, particularly the rights to privacy, freedom of expression and peaceful assembly must be provided to everyone, without discrimination.
In light of these findings, we request that in bilateral and multilateral dialogues with Thai authorities, your government urges the Thai government to adopt our recommendations, including:
- Publicly committing to refrain from the use of targeted digital surveillance and online harassment, and protecting HRDs and other members of civil society from such surveillance and harassment, both within and outside Thailand
- Carrying out a prompt, independent, impartial and transparent investigation into all documented and reported instances of TfGBV against women and LGBTI HRDs, including but not limited to the use of unlawful targeted digital surveillance and online harassment mentioned in this research;
- Providing effective remedy in line with IHRL and standards to survivors of TfGBV, that are trauma-informed, survivor-centric and adopt an intersectional feminist approach, including by ensuring access to information about human rights abuses against them, guaranteeing equal and effective access to justice and providing appropriate reparations based on consultations with the survivors;
- Ending all criminal proceedings against all people, including women and LGBTI HRDs, charged solely for their involvement in peaceful protests or for exercising their right to freedom of expression;
- Enforce a ban on highly invasive spyware, whose functionality cannot be limited to only those functions that are necessary and proportionate to a specific use and target, or whose use cannot be independently audited.
Yours sincerely,
[Your name]