“Labour-rights activist Andy Hall on trial in Thailand: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong’”, 7 September 2014

British labour-rights activist Andy Hall is facing eight years in prison and a $13m (£8m) fine for defamation after writing a report alleging labour abuses in the Natural Fruit Company, a large Thai pineapple wholesaler that supplies the EU…It is a case that human rights groups claim is a “complicit cover-up” by the government, an attempt to shoot the messenger rather than improve working conditions, and NGOs, industry experts and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world have signed petitions calling for Natural Fruit to drop its charges against him…[T]here are…worrying phonecalls. Hall says one caller – who claimed to be a relative of Natural Fruit’s owner, Nai Wirat – recently phoned to verbally attack him. And there have been warnings of worse: a Thai deputy minister personally told him that he was putting his life in danger…