Dressed as Harry Potter, He Questioned Thailand's Monarchy. Now He Faces Decades in Prison

You can hear the prisoners before you see them: shackles clinking around their ankles as they walk toward a Bangkok courtroom. Five men file in, used to the routine after spending much of the past five years shuttling between prison and court on multiple prosecutions. One of them, a small, bespectacled man with greying hair, opens his arms to hold his three-year-old son, brought by his partner to see him.

He is Arnon Nampa, a 42-year-old human rights lawyer. His offence was to call for Thailand's powerful monarchy to be scrutinised and held to account, which he did in 2020 while dressed as Harry Potter at a themed demonstration in central Bangkok. On Friday, a Bangkok court sentenced him to two years and eight months for violating the lèse majesté law, Article 112. It is one of 14 cases brought against him under the same charge, and his cumulative sentence now exceeds 34 years. Verdicts in two cases are still pending. "To me, this isn't a surprise," he told reporters afterward. "If the country was more open, we would be able to talk about these issues freely."

The law has been used more extensively in the past six years than at any point in Thai history. Since the student protests of 2020, 294 people have been prosecuted, 20 of them under 18, and sentences run as high as 50 years. Dozens remain on trial. Most defendants are refused bail and held for the years their cases take. Officials defend the law as reflecting Thailand's culture and history, with the monarchy as a pillar of the nation, highly revered by most Thais.

The statute itself is short: whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, heir-apparent or regent faces three to 15 years. In practice it has stretched far wider, to criticism of any royal family member, of the institution, of long-dead kings and, in one case, of the king's dog. Akarachai Chaimaneekarakate of Thai Lawyers for Human Rights says he can recite the text but cannot define how courts read "defame" or "insult", so vague are they. Even questioning the law can count as an offence, he says.

Arnon has spent the last three years in Bangkok Remand Prison, writing to his daughter Pran, who is 10, and his son Karl. Court hearings are the only times he has seen Karl since the boy was a baby. His partner, Lookwa, and Arnon think Karl is too young to visit the prison, so for now the boy believes the courtroom is where his father works. Pran sometimes visits and often draws and paints him. In one letter Arnon recalled a trip outside Bangkok the first winter after Karl was born, and said he would miss it every winter until he regains his freedom.

Before 2020, opinions about the monarchy were only whispered; one taxi driver was jailed after a passenger reported what he said in the cab. That changed on 3 August 2020. Younger Thais were frustrated with the government of coup-leader Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha, and the Constitutional Court had dissolved the popular reformist Future Forward party that February. When Covid-eased restrictions allowed rallies, students demanded an end to the military's political role. Arnon argued that did not go far enough. In his Harry Potter costume he spoke of the monarchy's opaque power and wealth, and criticised King Vajiralongkorn for taking personal control of the Crown Property Bureau's assets and of key army units. Prosecutions under the law had been suspended for three years, but they restarted from the end of 2020 and accelerated. Dozens of young activists fled abroad.

One is Supitcha "Melinn" Chailom, 24, from Chiang Mai, now in Montreal and wanted on four 112 charges. At 18 she gave a speech at a Chiang Mai University protest, and a photographer caught her raising the three-finger Hunger Games salute, an image that made her nationally famous. In November 2020, in Hat Yai, she compared the royal treatment of the king's dog with that of ordinary people. Nine months later police delivered a summons to her home. "I only talked about the dog," she said. She then joined Thalu Wang, which ran street polls on royal motorcades and the monarchy's power, thinking it safer than speeches. Two more charges came in 2022. Released on bail, she wore an ankle monitor, was barred from leaving home from 4pm to 6am, and her parents had to sign a pledge to inform on her. She fled, and Canada granted her asylum.

Reform is blocked. Parliament amended the law in 1976 to raise the penalty, but the Constitutional Court now treats it as untouchable. The Move Forward party, Future Forward's successor, was dissolved in 2024 and its leader banned from politics for proposing milder punishments. Chaimaneekarakate says judges refuse to subpoena witnesses or documents that could test claims that defendants lied about the monarchy, and that one lawyer who protested a secret trial was warned she faced contempt charges.

Arnon still prepares for every hearing, defending himself and helping other inmates, though he cannot bring notes and must memorise his arguments, barefoot and shackled in prison shorts. Two verdicts remain, and he may spend his life in prison. "Become a drop of water that will one day become an ocean," he wrote earlier this year.