Overthrowing Democracy: Lèse Majesté and the Judiciary in Thailand - featuring Professor Tyrell Haberkorn of University of Wisconsin
Room V
1111 East 60th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637
On 24 June 1932, a civilian-military coalition, the People’s Party, fomented a transformation from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in Thailand. Despite this transition, the place of the monarchy in the Thai polity has remained unclear and the very shape of the polity unresolved since then, as evidenced by the thirteen coups and twenty constitutions during the last 97 years. On 3 August 2020, a lawyer and human rights defender, Arnon Nampa, dared to call for clarification of the role of the monarchy in a public speech. Subsequently, Arnon, along with nearly 300 other dissidents active in the 2020-2021 democracy movement, has been prosecuted for violation of Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, or lèse majesté, for his peaceful speech. Imprisoned since September 2023 and repeatedly denied bail although none of his cases are final, Arnon’s sentence has already reached nearly twenty years. Arnon maintains that the questions he asks about a key institution are necessary for democracy, while the judges who have found him guilty insist that those questions endanger that very institution.
This talks juxtaposes close readings of recent Constitutional Court and Criminal Court judgments with close readings of the letters that Arnon writes and sends from prison to his family, legal and activist colleagues, Thai citizens and supporters around the world. In the widening gap between how the judiciary and Arnon understand the meanings of law and justice, the possibility of democracy hangs suspended.
Bio: Tyrell Haberkorn is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Co-Chair of the Human Rights Program, and Coordinator of the Justice in Southeast Asia Lab at the University of Wisconsin. Tyrell researches and writes about state violence and dissident cultural politics in Thailand from the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 until the present. She is the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) and In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Her most recent book, Dictatorship on Trial, a condensed history of injustice during the recent dictatorship of the National Council for Peace and Order in the form of rewritten court judgments, was published by Stanford University Press in June 2024. She is currently translating Prontip Mankhong’s prison memoir, All They Could Do To Us [มันทำร้ายเราได้แค่นี้แหละ] and writing a history of Thailand through the lens of political imprisonment. Tyrell also writes and translates frequently about Southeast Asia for a public audience, including Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Mekong Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, openDemocracy, and Prachatai. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, Association for Asian Studies, Australian Research Council, Einstein Forum, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Council of Learned Societies.