96 Dictating the Internet: In May 2019, the journalists were released pursuant to a presidential amnesty.353 v. Laws which aim to protect the courts Laws enacted or promulgated to protect certain aspects of the courts or judicial authority have also been wielded to curtail freedom of expression online. In Singapore and Malaysia, the instrument of “contempt of court” has been expanded to disproportionately extend powers of the court beyond a narrow legitimate aim of ensuring integrity and good order in court proceedings. In Thailand, contempt of court has been increasingly used in recent years to target independent individuals expressing disfavoured public comment. As emphasized by the UN Human Rights Committee, where limitations to freedom of expression are adopted even for a legitimate purpose, such as to maintain public order, contempt of court proceedings and penalties imposed for exercising the right to free expression must be strictly necessary and proportionate to that end. This means they must be specifically “warranted in the exercise of a court’s power to maintain orderly proceedings” and must not infringe upon the legitimate exercise of the rights of the defence.354 Where contempt proceedings are brought against lawyers, as in some cases highlighted below, they may serve to violate basic tenets governing the legal profession and protections to which lawyers are entitled and reflected in international standards. The UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers makes clear that lawyers must “enjoy civil and penal immunity 10 September 2018, Available at: https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/calls-mount-officialsecrets-act-amended-wake-reuters-case.html; In a similar case, in July 2014, the Chief Executive Officer and four journalists with Unity Journal newspaper were sentenced to ten years in prison with hard labour for publishing a report alleging a Myanmar military facility had been used to manufacture chemical weapons. In April 2016, they were released pursuant to a presidential amnesty. See Zarni Mann, ‘Unity Journalists Sentenced to 10 Years Imprisonment With Hard Labor’, The Irrawaddy, 10 July 2014, Available at: https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/ unity-journalists-sentenced-10-years-imprisonment-hard-labor.html; PEN International ‘Myanmar: Five journalists released following presidential pardon’, 22 April 2016, Available at: https://peninternational.org/news/myanmar-five-journalists-released-following-presidential-pardon 353 BBC, ‘Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo: Reuters journalists freed in Myanmar’, 7 May 2019, Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48182712; In April 2019, the ICJ and 19 other organizations urged a parliamentary committee formed to review Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution to amend the Constitution to guarantee the rights to free expression and information and media freedom in line with international human rights law. See ICJ, ‘Joint statement: constitutional reform must guarantee the right to freedom of expression in Myanmar’, 11 April 2019, Available at: https://www.icj.org/joint-statement-constitutional-reform-must-guarantee-the-right-tofreedom-of-expression-in-myanmar/ 354 CCPR/C/GC/34, paras 24, 31.