Social media post about unpaid water bill was corrected within 30 minutes, but suit went ahead
PUBLISHED : 13 Nov 2025 at 16:26
NARATHIWAT – A human rights defender in southern Thailand has offered forgiveness to the Royal Thai Navy after a court threw out a charge against her arising from a post that lived on the internet for only 30 minutes.
The navy pressed a charge under the Computer Crime Act against Anchana Heemmina last year for inferring that it owed a water bill of 20,000 baht to a local mosque.
She gave an incorrect location for the mosque, and it turned out the army was the debtor, but she quickly corrected it. But the navy went ahead with the case anyway.
In a Facebook message on Thursday, and without naming the navy, Ms Anchana said she forgave any party for the recklessness and lack of thoroughness leading to an unnecessary legal battle and verbal harassment.
She posted the message after the Narathiwat Provincial Court on Nov 6 dismissed the charge filed against her by the navy.
The navy said its reputation had been damaged by the social media post on May 9, 2024 about 20,000 baht in unpaid utility bills owed to a masjid.
“What should we do? A mosque in Bacho district in Narathiwat province has tried in vain to get the amount of 20,000 baht in bills from a military post using its running water,” Ms Anchana wrote.
The mosque in question turned out to be in Sai Buri district of Pattani, which is under the responsibility of the Royal Thai Army. Bacho is under the supervision of the navy.
Ms Anchana corrected the location of the masjid to Sai Buri 30 minutes later but the navy was not satisfied.
The court said the charge was dismissed because her mistake was not due to any malicious intent against the navy.
Ms Anchana is the founder of the Duayjai Group, a non-governmental organisation providing rehabilitation services to torture victims in the deep South.
She rose to prominence in 2016 when she and two colleagues released an e-book on torture of detainees, leading to a defamation suit by the Internal Security Operations Command (Isoc).
Isoc eventually agreed in March 2017 to drop all defamation charges after the two sides agreed to work together to prove 54 allegations raised in the book.
In her post on Thursday, Ms Anchana said the legal move by the navy was another attempt to use legal threats to silence critics, activists and human rights advocates in the southern region. She also demanded an end to the practice.
What the state has done will be “a boomerang that erodes public confidence in justice and the state, which will not be conducive to attempts to resolve conflicts in the region”, she wrote.