Dr. Tyrell Haberkorn and Dr. Paul Chambers join Free to Think to discuss the use of Thailand’s lèse-majesté law to intimidate and silence scholars.

After three decades living and working in Thailand, Professor Paul Chambers was arrested in April 2025 and charged under Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code with lèse-majesté, or insulting the monarchy. He believes he was targeted in retaliation for his research on the military and democracy. After an international campaign on his behalf, the charges against him were dropped, but he lost his university position, and his visa was revoked. He is currently in the United States, where he notes: “If I am outside of Thailand, I can go on with my work and probably do a better job of describing the problems of the Thai military.”

Professor Tyrell Haberkorn is an expert on state violence in Thailand. She highlights the chilling effect of Paul’s arrest on scholars and the wider society, as well as the history of lèse-majesté law in Thailand. “People were jailed for performing plays, for having conversations in taxis, for bathroom graffiti, for social media posts.”

Free to Think speaks with Omar Gómez Trejo, a lawyer and human rights advocate from Mexico. Omar gained prominence as the special prosecutor leading the investigation into the disappearance of 43 student teachers from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in the city of Iguala, Mexico.

From 2019-2022, Omar’s team secured indictments for over 100 federal, state, and local authorities for their involvement in the disappearances or subsequent cover-ups, including military officials and organized crime members. His team also worked closely with the families of victims and their legal representatives in their search for truth and justice.

Facing significant political interference in the case, Omar resigned as special prosecutor in 2022. Through SAR’s Practitioners at Risk program, Omar is a visiting scholar at the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law. There, he continues to work on the Ayotzinapa case through his research and teaching, while drawing on his experience with the case to work on broader issues of impunity for human rights violations in Mexico and beyond.

See SAR’s monitoring of the 2014 Ayotzinapa case: https://ow.ly/blY950VwQTm

Listen to “After Ayotzinapa” on Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting: https://revealnews.org/article/after-ayotzinapa/

As the first in her family to attend university, Dr. Encieh Erfani was drawn to the stars. Her interest led her to physics and cosmology, examining the origin of the universe – a rare subject in Iran at the time.

Dr. Erfani was traveling outside of Iran in September 2022 when the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement began, sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini. In solidarity, Dr. Erfani stepped down from her academic position in Iran. Her resignation email quickly went viral on social media and she has not been able to return since, knowing she would risk imprisonment by Iranian authorities. “As a scientist, you have never trained to be a social activist or political activist, but in some countries, your actions can be considered a political act,” she says. “A simple resignation can lead to exile.”’

In response, Dr. Erfani co-founded the International Community of Iranian Academics (ICOIA), a group providing community and support to academics of Iranian heritage around the world. Now at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, she continues her work as a researcher and staunch advocate for displaced academics worldwide.

Learn more about Dr. Erfani’s work: https://sites.google.com/view/eerfani/home

Learn more about the International Community of Iranian Academics (ICOIA): https://icoia.org/

This episode is brought to you in partnership with the Fragile Freedom podcast, a joint-initiative of the German science communications agency con gressa and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of Science Year 2024 Freedom. See the Fragile Freedom podcast here: https://fragile-freedom.podigee.io/