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Shackles clink in steady, unmistakeable rhythm down the narrow corridor leading to Bangkok’s criminal court, as five long-time political detainees make their way to yet another procedural hearing, navigating a years-long maze of overlapping criminal prosecutions that have defined nearly half a decade of their lives. Among them is 42-year-old human rights lawyer Arnon Nampa, a greying, bespectacled man who breaks away from the group the moment he spots his three-year-old son Karl, brought to the courtroom by his partner for a rare in-person visit.
Arnon’s path to incarceration traces back to a landmark 2020 Harry Potter-themed rally in central Bangkok, where he donned the iconic young wizard’s signature round glasses and cloak to deliver the first ever public, unapologetic call for Thailand’s powerful monarchy to be subjected to public scrutiny and formal accountability. Last Friday, a Bangkok court handed down a 2-year and 8-month prison sentence for his actions, a conviction under the kingdom’s sweeping lèse majesté legislation, formally known as Article 112. To date, more people have been jailed under this single law for perceived insults against the royal family than across every other country with comparable royal defamation statutes combined.
This latest ruling is just one of 14 separate lèse majesté cases filed against Arnon, pushing his total accumulated prison sentence to over 34 years, with two additional verdicts still pending. Speaking to reporters immediately after the ruling, Arnon remained stoic: “To me, this isn’t a surprise. If the country was more open, we would be able to talk about these issues freely.” His three-year-old son currently believes the courtroom is simply where his father goes to work, unaware that the only other glimpses of his dad he gets come from hand-drawn illustrations his 10-year-old sister Pran creates, many of which depict their father behind bars or at court hearings, emblazoned with the slogan “Free my dad.”
The past six years mark the most aggressive period of lèse majesté enforcement in Thai history, a direct response to the 2020 wave of student-led mass protests that shattered a centuries-old national taboo by demanding open public discussion of the monarchy’s role in governance. Since that wave of demonstrations began, 294 people – 20 of them under the age of 18 – have been prosecuted under Article 112, with some receiving sentences as long as 50 years, and dozens still awaiting trial. The vast majority of those charged are denied bail, left to languish in pre-trial detention for years as their cases drag on. Thai government officials routinely defend the law as a core reflection of national identity, noting that the monarchy is one of the three foundational pillars of Thai society and widely revered by the population.
On paper, Article 112 is brief, stating that anyone who defames, insults, or threatens the King, Queen, Heir-apparent, or Regent faces 3 to 15 years in prison. In practice, however, enforcement has stretched far beyond that narrow text, targeting commentary on nearly every aspect of the royal institution, from critiques of long-dead monarchs to public jokes about the king’s pet dog. “If you ask me what the text of the law says, I can tell you,” explains Akarachai Chaimaneekarakate, assistant director of Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, an organization that provides legal defence for Article 112 defendants. “If you ask me how the courts interpret the words ‘defame’ or ‘insult’, I don’t think I can give you a definition, because it’s so ambiguous, it’s so vague. Even questioning the law itself, for example, can constitute lèse majesté under Section 112.”
For the past three years, Arnon has been held in Bangkok Remand Prison, where he sends regular handwritten letters to his two young children. One recent message reads: “Dear Pran and Karl, my beloved children, The winter wind has not only brought us cool weather, but also brings back stories from the past. I miss the time we travelled outside Bangkok that first winter after Karl came into this world. It was such a magical time for me. I shall miss it every winter I spend here until I regain my freedom.”
The sweeping crackdown on free speech under Article 112 has effectively erased nearly all public discussion of the monarchy, which for decades was only ever whispered in private, unrecorded conversations. One widely cited case saw a taxi driver jailed after a passenger reported critical comments he had made about the royal family during a ride. That long-standing silence was broken on August 3, 2020, when public frustration boiled over against the military-backed conservative government led by 2014 coup leader Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha. A year prior, millions of Thai voters had cast ballots for the progressive Future Forward Party, which promised sweeping military reform, only for the Constitutional Court to dissolve the party on a procedural technicality in February 2020. COVID-19 lockdowns paused public demonstrations for three months, but once infection rates fell, student organizers launched rallies demanding an end to military interference in civilian politics. Arnon argued these demands did not go far enough, and his Harry Potter-themed speech calling for scrutiny of the monarchy’s opaque wealth and unaccountable power – including King Vajiralongkorn’s decision to seize direct personal control of the multi-billion dollar Crown Property Bureau and key royal army units – shattered a taboo that had stood unbroken for generations of Thai society.
At the time Arnon gave that speech, lèse majesté prosecutions had been suspended for three years, with palace insiders acknowledging that the negative international publicity generated by high-profile convictions was doing far more harm to the monarchy’s reputation than any critical public commentary. But the unprecedented scale of the 2020 protests forced a sudden policy reversal, and by the end of that year, Article 112 prosecutions had restarted and accelerated at a rapid pace, pushing dozens of young activists to flee the country to avoid decades of jail time.
Among those exiled activists is 24-year-old Supitcha “Melinn” Chailom, who now lives in Montreal, Canada, after fleeing four separate lèse majesté charges against her. She was an 18-year-old high school student when she delivered a speech at a Chiang Mai University protest just three weeks after Arnon’s landmark 2020 speech, raising the iconic Hunger Games three-finger salute in a photograph that became one of the defining visual symbols of the pro-reform movement. The young activist, who once dreamed of working as a video game designer, traveled across the country leading rallies, organizing public opinion polls about the monarchy, and demanding sweeping overhauls of Thailand’s rigid, outdated education system. “I felt that, as a young person, I could not question, or have a discussion with people older than me. The monarchy gave me the same vibe,” she recalled in a recent interview from her Canadian asylum home.
Her legal troubles began after a 2020 Hat Yai protest where she compared the special royal treatment afforded to the king’s pet dog to the struggles faced by ordinary Thai citizens. Nine months later, police arrived at her family home to serve her a lèse majesté summons. “It was a shock. I wasn’t expecting it because I only talked about the dog,” she said. “They tried to stay calm, but I nearly lost my mind.” After receiving two additional lèse majesté charges in 2022, she was placed under home detention, forced to wear an electronic ankle monitor, and barred from leaving her home between 4pm and 6am, with her parents required to sign a formal document promising to report any unapproved activity to authorities. Facing the prospect of decades behind bars, she fled the country with a friend, eventually securing refugee status in Canada.
While Article 112 is technically a piece of ordinary legislation that could be amended by elected members of parliament, the Thai Constitutional Court has since ruled that the law – and the royal institution it protects – is effectively untouchable. The progressive Move Forward Party, the direct successor to the dissolved Future Forward, was disbanded in 2024, and its party leader banned from public office entirely, for the sole act of proposing modest reforms to reduce the harshness of lèse majesté prison sentences. Courts have also systematically blocked defendants from mounting meaningful defences: “In many cases, like the one against Arnon Nampa, prosecutors accuse the defendant of lying about the monarchy,” Akarachai noted. “But when we ask the judge to subpoena documents or witnesses who could show the truth of what the defendant says, the judge refuses to do it. When one lawyer protested against the court deciding that the trial would be held in secret, she was warned by the judge to be quiet or face a contempt of court charge.”
Even with 34 years of accumulated sentences hanging over him, Arnon continues to meticulously prepare for every court appearance, representing himself and offering legal guidance to fellow detainees, all without being allowed to bring written notes into the courtroom, forcing him to memorize every line of his legal arguments. The judges often object to the sight of him acting as a defence lawyer while dressed in standard brown prison shorts, barefoot and still wearing his ankle shackles, but these rare court appearances are his only chance to see his children in person. In a letter to his family last year, he wrote: “Since the first day that we made up our mind to take up this mission, we knew of the dangers. Speaking the truth is not difficult. What is difficult is speaking a forbidden truth. I remember well that on the evening of 3 August 2020, after speaking at the Harry Potter event, I felt very good, content, and relieved to have finally begun speaking about the truth, in public.” A more recent letter adds: “Living here is a struggle. But it is just a dot in the bigger picture of our movement’s struggle. We must play a part in writing our own history. Become a drop of water that will one day become an ocean.”

For over half a century, the deep-seated rivalry between Algeria and Morocco has been largely defined by two core flashpoints: the contested status of Western Sahara, and the decades-long tussle for regional leadership across the Maghreb. A former Spanish colonial territory, Western Sahara is mostly controlled by Morocco, which claims full sovereignty over the region, while Algeria backs the Polisario Front, the indigenous movement demanding a UN-supervised self-determination referendum for the local Sahrawi population. Parallel to this territorial dispute, the two North African nations have vied for status as the Maghreb’s leading power ever since securing their independence, frictions that have fueled years of severe diplomatic breakdown: their shared land border has remained fully closed since 1994, and formal bilateral ties were completely severed in 2021. In a notable new shift, however, this long-running competition has now expanded far south of the Maghreb, into the vast, geopolitically turbulent Sahel region.

Today, the Sahel has emerged as a sprawling new arena for the two nations to extend their influence, with battles unfolding across diplomacy, security policy, infrastructure investment, energy development, cross-border trade, and even religious cooperation, all against a backdrop of rapid, sweeping geopolitical upheaval across West Africa. This new playing field has opened up just as the three member states of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) — Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — have actively distanced themselves from their longstanding Western allies, and are aggressively diversifying their international partnerships to reduce external dependence. It is within this fast-evolving landscape that Algeria and Morocco now find themselves locked in a tight, head-to-head contest for regional clout.

For Algeria, engagement with the Sahel is rooted first and foremost in non-negotiable national security imperatives. Both Mali and Niger share extensive, largely unpatrolled land borders with Algeria, meaning any political upheaval or security breakdown in these two nations has immediate, direct spillover impacts on Algerian territory. Transnational armed extremist groups, widespread cross-border smuggling networks, and chronic political instability along its southern frontier are threats Algeria cannot afford to overlook. This pressing reality has pushed Algiers to gradually abandon its long-held foreign policy doctrine of strict non-intervention in the internal affairs of neighboring states. As Jalel Harchaoui, a senior analyst at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, emphasized in an interview with Middle East Eye: “Algeria does not make its decisions based on Morocco.”

In a landmark break from past policy, just one day after a foiled coup attempt in Niger’s capital Niamey on August 30, Algeria deployed four Su-30 fighter jets to Niger at the formal request of local authorities. By October 25, Algeria’s national parliament had formally approved the deployment of Algerian ground troops to Niger, marking the first such foreign military deployment for the country since 1973. Algiers has also moved aggressively to rebuild its diplomatic footprint in a region where its influence had eroded significantly following a series of high-profile rifts with the governments in Bamako and Niamey. The diplomatic falling out with Mali dates back to December 2023, when Mali publicly accused Algeria of interfering in its domestic affairs, and both nations recalled their respective ambassadors. This rift deepened further in January 2024, when Mali’s ruling junta formally denounced the 2015 Algiers peace agreement — a landmark Algeria-brokered deal designed to end decades of unrest and stabilize northern Mali. The dispute escalated to engulf the entire AES bloc in April 2025, after Algerian air defenses shot down a Malian drone, with both governments insisting the aircraft had been operating in their own sovereign airspace. In the aftermath, all three AES member states recalled their ambassadors from Algiers, and Algeria reciprocated. In recent months, however, Algeria’s bilateral ties with Niamey have improved dramatically.

While Morocco shares no direct land borders with any AES state, it has also been steadily advancing its own strategic interests across the Sahel. Harchaoui cautioned against over-simplifying the regional dynamic, noting that observers should not automatically attribute every move by either country to a direct tit-for-tat response to the other. “It’s not about seeing Morocco everywhere,” he explained, adding that Moroccan influence is highly visible in Mali but remains far more limited in Niger. He reiterated that Algeria’s policy choices are overwhelmingly driven by on-the-ground security priorities, not a preoccupation with competing with Rabat. Harchaoui also highlighted a notable recent shift in the positions of the Bamako and Niamey governments, which now increasingly endorse Algeria’s longstanding policy of pursuing negotiated political solutions to the Tuareg question, rather than relying exclusively on military force. The Tuareg, a Berber ethnic community spread across northern Mali, Niger, and southern Algeria, have demanded greater autonomy and formal state recognition ever since their respective countries gained independence, grievances that have sparked multiple armed uprisings including the 2012 Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali. This growing alignment on conflict resolution has been a key driver of Algeria’s renewed influence in the Sahel, bolstered by its geographic proximity, decades of on-the-ground knowledge of local community dynamics, and long track record mediating Tuareg-related crises.

Morocco, by contrast, has pursued a distinctly different strategy that places far less emphasis on security cooperation. “Morocco is constantly working to strengthen economic, religious, cultural and diplomatic ties with Sahelian states,” Rida Lyammouri, senior fellow at the Policy Center for the New South and an independent Sahel-focused consultant, told Middle East Eye. Moroccan banking groups already have established a widespread presence across multiple West African nations, and Rabat leverages this extensive financial network alongside targeted direct investments to expand its economic footprint across the region. The kingdom has also rolled out large-scale agricultural development partnerships and targeted training programs for Sahelian imams, framing these initiatives as vehicles for constructive religious and cultural cooperation. In April 2025, the three AES member states formally endorsed Morocco’s Atlantic Initiative during a summit in Rabat, a policy framework designed to grant landlocked Sahelian nations direct access to Atlantic coastal shipping routes via Moroccan port infrastructure. The initiative signals Rabat’s far broader ambitions beyond simple trade access: it lays the groundwork for a sprawling cross-continental economic corridor linking Morocco directly to West Africa and the Sahel. This strategy is already being advanced via the Dakhla-Nouakchott transport and economic integration project: a bilateral framework agreement signed in September between Morocco and Mauritania outlines plans to rehabilitate and expand Mauritania’s RN4 highway, as part of a larger integrated transport axis connecting Dakhla in southern Western Sahara, the Guerguerat border crossing, and the Mauritanian coastal cities of Nouadhibou and Nouakchott. The planned new Dakhla Atlantic port, scheduled to begin full operations in 2028, is designed to serve as the central maritime hub for this entire trans-Sahelian economic corridor.

This dynamic positions Mauritania as a critical strategic linchpin, sitting at the exact intersection of Morocco’s westward-focused regional ambitions and Algeria’s eastward-oriented Sahel interests. The two North African powers are now pursuing two competing, mutually exclusive corridor models: Algeria has long projected its influence southwards into the Sahel via its own southern land borders and historic trans-Saharan trade networks, while Morocco is building an entirely new Atlantic access route running through Mauritania. Both strategies are rooted in the shared core assessment that for the largely landlocked Sahel region, cross-border infrastructure and guaranteed access to global markets function as powerful instruments of geopolitical leverage. Energy competition has also become a key component of this contest: the proposed 6,000-kilometer Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline, which will run through Mauritania, is still seeking full project financing, and directly competes with the parallel trans-Saharan Nigeria-Niger-Algeria gas pipeline, whose Algerian section officially broke ground in June. Both projects are designed to transport vast volumes of Nigerian natural gas to lucrative European consumer markets. The United Arab Emirates has emerged as a quiet but influential background player in this regional competition: Abu Dhabi is financing and developing a network of new infrastructure and port facilities across Mauritania, moves that effectively strengthen Morocco’s strategic position in the area. Algeria has long viewed the deepening strategic alignment between the UAE and Morocco — and Abu Dhabi’s explicit support for Rabat’s position on the Western Sahara dispute — with deep suspicion. This long-running mistrust boiled over into a full diplomatic break in September, when Algeria formally severed all bilateral relations with the UAE, accusing Abu Dhabi of carrying out hostile acts and unwarranted interference in North African regional affairs.

This expanding economic and diplomatic rivalry has been accompanied by a parallel regional arms build-up. Algeria remains by a wide margin Africa’s largest military spender: according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the country allocated approximately $25.4 billion to its defense budget in 2025, marking an 11 percent year-on-year increase. Morocco ranked as the continent’s second largest military spender, with a 6.6 percent year-on-year rise to $6.3 billion. While this military expansion has sparked widespread concerns about the risk of future armed escalation, most regional analysts agree it is highly unlikely that the Sahel will become a theatre of direct military confrontation between Algeria and Morocco. Instead, the build-up underscores a broader reality: the decades-old strategic rivalry between the two Maghreb powers has now spilled far beyond their traditional shared regional borders. “The fundamental question is whether Sahelian states can turn this competition into an opportunity to strengthen their strategic autonomy,” noted Oumar Keita, former Malian ambassador to UNESCO and president of the Sahel-Africa Institute for Diplomacy and Influence (Isadi). Keita rejects the framing that the ongoing arms build-up will inevitably lead to direct military conflict between the two North African neighbors. “I would speak more of a competition for positioning and influence than of confrontation,” he explained to Middle East Eye. He also pushed back against the common external narrative that frames the Sahel as an empty, passive geopolitical space where outside powers can simply project influence unimpeded. For the three AES ruling juntas, which have already turned to Russia as a key security and political partner in their push to reduce decades of dependence on France and other traditional Western allies, the current competition between Algeria and Morocco creates valuable new diplomatic and material options. Keita argues that Sahelian governments should avoid aligning exclusively with a single external power, and instead pursue a deliberate “diplomacy of diversification” built on multiple complementary international partnerships. The key risk of the current dynamic, he warns, is that Sahel states may simply end up swapping one set of external dependencies for another. “Lasting influence cannot be decreed. It is built through trust, continuity of commitments and tangible results for populations.”

This reality will be the defining test for both Algeria and Morocco as they pursue their regional ambitions. At present, Morocco holds a clear early advantage in the economic and infrastructure development spheres, while Algeria retains unique strengths from its geographic proximity to the Sahel, longstanding security cooperation experience, and deep diplomatic ties across Mali and Niger. Neither power, however, holds unchallenged dominance over the region, which continues to be shaped by its own ongoing domestic political crises, local communal conflicts, persistent armed extremist groups, and the sovereign independent policy choices of Sahelian national governments. “The question is therefore not whether Algiers or Rabat will gain more influence in the Sahel. The fundamental question is whether Sahelian states can turn this competition into an opportunity to strengthen their strategic autonomy, development and collective ability to defend their interests,” Keita emphasized. The future trajectory of this fast-evolving regional dynamic will be clearly visible via two key upcoming milestones: the scheduled 2028 opening of the new Dakhla Atlantic port, and Algeria’s ability to translate its recent diplomatic reset with the Bamako and Niamey governments into tangible, visible on-the-ground development projects that benefit local populations.

A London crown court heard on Friday that a UK-based Israeli-owned arms manufacturing facility targeted by pro-Palestine activists in August 2024 was on the verge of dispatching a drone shipment bound for Israel at the time of the direct action. The five defendants facing trial at Woolwich Crown Court — 21-year-old Qesser Zuhrah, 26-year-old Zahra Farooque, 29-year-old Kamran Ahmed, 31-year-old Heba Muraisi, and 34-year-old Liam Mullany — are formally charged with criminal damage and violent disorder over the break-in at the Elbit Systems site in Filton, a town near Bristol, on 6 August 2024.

Testifying this week, Zuhrah, who identified herself as a core coordinator of the action, told jurors the group accelerated their planned operation after learning of the impending weapons shipment from other Palestine Action members. At the time of the raid, Zuhrah was a 19-year-old university student, and she stated under oath that Elbit Systems supplies an estimated 85% of Israel’s land-based military hardware, with the Filton facility producing drones that the company openly acknowledges are field-tested on Palestinian populations. She emphasized her belief that the drones set to ship from the site were destined for use in Gaza, dismissing any suggestion this was an unsubstantiated assumption.

Prosecutors have framed the five defendants as members of a so-called “black team” whose stated objective was to overwhelm on-site security personnel to clear a path for a second “red team” of activists, who planned to use a repurposed prison van to ram through the factory’s loading bay shutters and destroy stored military equipment. Prosecution claims allege the black team members, dressed in matching black jumpsuits, deployed threats, intimidation, fireworks, and carried implements including whips, hammers, and large kebab skewers to assault or coerce security staff. All five defendants have entered not-guilty pleas to all charges against them.

Under direct examination from her defense counsel Garry Green KC, Zuhrah pushed back against the prosecution’s framing of the black team’s purpose, explaining their sole intended role was to create a distraction: generating a thick smoke screen via flares and fireworks to obscure the red team’s movements, and using loud pyrotechnics to muffle the sound of the prison van crashing through the loading bay, before evacuating the site immediately. Zuhrah confirmed she purchased many of the items used in the operation, including fireworks and flares, as well as contingency tools such as axes, crowbars, and hammers that would only be deployed to cut through shutters if the van failed to breach the entrance. She addressed court testimony that she had referred to these tools as “weapons” in pre-action group messages, explaining the term was used interchangeably with “tools” or “equipment” because the group had been discussing arms factories nonstop in the lead-up to the action, and the implements were designated to destroy weapons held inside the facility, not harm people.

Zuhrah also clarified the purpose of the kebab skewers carried by the black team: the sharpened metal sticks were intended to puncture the tires of the prison van if it failed to break through the shutters, leaving the disabled vehicle parked across the loading bay to block any outgoing weapons shipments for an extended period of time. When asked directly by her lawyer if the raid plan ever included intentional violence or threats of harm against security staff or other individuals on site, Zuhrah responded with a firm “absolutely not.” She noted that prior Palestine Action operations typically relied on evasive tactics, with activists fleeing quickly and using winding routes to shake off pursuing security personnel, with no intention of lingering to provoke confrontation. She added that the team was fully aware Elbit’s on-site security staff were largely ex-military and highly trained, making any prolonged direct confrontation impractical.

The court heard that after the red team’s van breached the site’s outer perimeter fence, the black team advanced on foot toward the loading bay, where one member used an angle grinder to weaken the metal shutters to make it easier for the van to ram through. The rest of the black team began lighting fireworks and flares to generate rapid, dense smoke to obscure their movements, and Zuhrah emphasized she threw all of her lit flares into an empty open space ahead of her, and had not spotted any security staff at that point in the operation.

Once the van successfully crashed through the loading bay shutters, the black team moved toward the outer perimeter fence to evacuate as originally planned, before a member of the group spotted a fellow activist being dragged backward by the throat by two unseen security guards through the thick smoke. Distressed by what she initially mistook as a lifeless body being pulled away, Zuhrah lit a firework and discharged it into the open space in front of her, hoping the sudden noise and light would break up the altercation and stop the guard’s assault. She stressed she did not aim the firework at the security staff, and had no intention of causing anyone burns or physical harm, as the guards were not positioned directly in her line of sight at the time.

Zuhrah told the court that at one point during the chaotic incident, a security guard picked up an axe and a whip and began swinging them wildly while shouting, leaving her fearing for her safety. She noted the unplanned detour to intervene in the altercation derailed her original plan to leave the site quickly to return home and sit for scheduled university exams. When the group finally fled toward the perimeter fence, a pursuing security guard lashed Zuhrah with the whip as she attempted to climb a pole to scale the barrier, after she failed to scramble over the main fencing alongside her peers.

During cross-examination by lead prosecutor Deanna Heer KC, Zuhrah was questioned about a pre-operation message she sent to a prospective activist noting that many Elbit security staff were ex-military, framing the situation as “literally fight or flight.” Zuhrah explained the message was not referencing planned violence, but was a screening measure to ensure the recruit remained calm and level-headed in the event of a potential unexpected confrontation, rather than panicking and escalating the situation. When questioned about a separate conversation with an activist who refused to let his younger brother join the action, Zuhrah clarified that the concerns raised were about the risk of arrest, not any planned violent conduct. The trial remains ongoing at Woolwich Crown Court.