Thailand: Computer Crime Act, 2017 Analysis of the Amended Act General comments Before laying down our specific concerns, ARTICLE 19 would like to make the following general comments about the Amended Act. No requirements for serious harm, and enhanced penalties: We are concerned that most criminal liability attaches. Further, sentencing enhancements contained in the Amended Act provide for significantly increased sentences up to ten- or twenty-fold without meaningful intentionality or harm requirements. Section 12, for instance, provides that most of the Amended ences can have severely increased penalties when the acts Strict liability offences: Virtually none of the offences articulate a mens rea requirement provides little notice to individuals and causes many offences to fail to be adequately defined in law (as per the requirements of the three part test see above). We suggest mens rea be required. We also recommend that the sentences available for offences against the confidentiality, integrity and availability of computer data and systems should be reduced to one-year maximum.45 Amended Act where appropriate; High number of offences, including overlapping offences: We note that the Amended Act incorporates an unusually high number of computer-related offences as subsections of its offences, and we question the necessity of this approach. From a comparative perspective, we note that the Act introduces several offences that do not exist in instruments like the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention. We suggest that the Thai legislators consider that the Cybercrime Convention contains only five such offences; whilst the UK Computer Misuse Act 1990 contains four such offences and to our knowledge there have been no concerns raised that the UK is not properly equipped to deal with cybercrime; Child sex abuse images: ARTICLE 19 observes that the Act, while criminalising many unnecessary activities online, does not contain any provisions on child sexual abuse recommendations of the Special Rapporteur on FOE and the Cybercrime Convention, the and legitimate objective. Child sexual abuse images are a type of expression that States are required to prohibit under international law.46 Prohibition of this offence might be provided for in other Thai legislation. In any case, such an offence could be drafted tracking the definitions contained in Article 9 of the Cybercrime Convention which lays down a 45 46 C.f. 1990 Act 3(6). C.f. the May 2011 Report of the Special Rapporteur, op.cit.; and the Cybercrime Convention, Article 9. ARTICLE 19 Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Rd, London EC1R 3GA Page 13 of 24 www.article19.org +44 20 7324 2500