A Thai court has sentenced the political activist Arnon Nampa to an additional two years and eight months in prison for defaming the monarchy during a protest in 2020, bringing his total prison term to more than 34 years.

The 42-year-old has been in prison since 2023 on multiple charges under Thailand’s Article 112, commonly known as the lese-majeste law, which criminalizes criticisms of the Thai king or the royal family.

In a hearing on Friday at the Bangkok Criminal Court, Arnon and four other defendants – Wanwalee Thammasattaya, Phongsatorn Tancharoen, Promsorn Veerathamjaree, and Nawat Liangwattana – were sentenced to two years and eight months in prison on a fresh count of lese majeste, the AFP news agency reported.

According to a report in Thailand’s The Nation newspaper, the charges stem from a 2020 protest that Arnon participated in front of the Siam Commercial Bank headquarters. During the protest, the defendants took turns delivering speeches calling “for the resignation of then prime minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha, constitutional amendments, and reform of the monarchy.”

Arnon’s lawyer Krisadang Nutcharut told AFP that Arnon was calling for increased transparency over a transfer of shares in Siam Commercial Bank, Thailand’s oldest bank, from the Crown Property Bureau. King Vajiralongkorn is the largest shareholder in SCBx, the bank’s parent company.

The defendants attempted to argue that their conduct was protected by the constitutional right to assembly. However, the judges ruled that the remarks exceeded lawful limits and insulted and defamed the monarchy. The Court initially sentenced each of them to four years in prison, which was reduced to two years and eight months each, stating that their testimony “was of some assistance to the proceedings.”

Arnon was one of the main leaders of the campaign of youth-dominated protests that erupted in the first half of 2020, after the court-ordered dissolution of the progressive Future Forward Party. Before they petered out in 2021, due to a combination of COVID-19 restrictions and state repression, the protests were notable for breaching the taboo on open discussion of the monarchy and its political role.

Thailand’s conservative establishment responded by initiating scores of lese-majeste complaints against the main leaders of the protest movement. Since the 2020 protests, 294 people have been prosecuted for defaming the monarchy, including 20 under the age of 18.

While the law is technically reserved for instances in which an individual “defames, insults, or threatens” key members of the royal family, some of these recent cases have involved very minor offenses that have been reported to the authorities by royalist “petitioners.”

Once an individual has been charged, acquittals are rare. In 2022, a man was sentenced to two years in prison for placing a sticker on a portrait of King Vajiralongkorn. The following year, another man received the same sentence for selling calendars featuring cartoons of yellow ducks that authorities alleged defamed the monarchy.

Arnon was first convicted and sentenced in September 2023 to four years in prison for a speech he gave during pro-democracy protests in October 2020. Arnon has since faced 13 other lese-majeste cases linked to social media posts and comments delivered at protests, which have pushed up his total sentence to more than 34 years. One of these concerned his participation in a Harry Potter-themed protest in August 2020, which was publicized as “Harry Potter versus You-Know-Who or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” a reference to the taboos surrounding any discussion of the Thai king. The verdict in two cases is still pending.

This legal offensive has spawned a political movement for the amendment or abolition of Article 112. Invariably, this too has been interpreted by Thailand’s courts as a breach of Article 112, and the pretext for further proscriptions of political speech. In August 2024, the Constitutional Court disbanded the progressive Move Forward Party, Future Forward’s successor, saying that it violated the constitution by proposing an amendment of the lese-majeste law.

This rash of convictions has largely validated the claims of opponents of Article 112 that the law has been used to silence dissent – in particular, to prevent any public discussion of the political role played by the Thai monarchy. In a statement, the International Federation for Human Rights stated that Article 112 and Article 116, which governs sedition, had been subject to a “systematic abuse… against peaceful critics and protesters” that “reflects a broader pattern of judicial harassment and a shrinking civic space in Thailand.”

Such cases “appear to be solely aimed at punishing them for their legitimate human rights activities and the peaceful exercise of their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” it added.