Rights groups decry Tunisia’s ‘injustice’, crackdown on activists

International NGOs Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have decried a sharp decline in civil liberties and a pervading “injustice” in Tunisia since President Kais Saied came to power in 2019, as authorities escalate their crackdown on the opposition, activists and foreign nongovernmental organisations.

“Tunisian authorities have increasingly escalated their crackdown on human rights defenders and independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) through arbitrary arrests, detention, asset freezes, bank restrictions and court-ordered suspensions, all under the pretext of fighting ‘suspicious’ foreign funding and shielding ‘national interests’,” Amnesty International said in a statement on Friday.

Tunisia’s crackdown on civil society has reached an unprecedented level, according to Amnesty, as six NGO workers and human rights defenders from the Tunisian Council for Refugees are “being criminally prosecuted on charges solely related to their legitimate work supporting refugees and asylum seekers”. The trial’s opening session, initially scheduled for October 16, has been adjourned to November 24.

It is a long way from the heady days of the Arab Spring in 2011, when Tunisia appeared to be the only country to emerge relatively unscathed in the initial years that followed with a bona fide democracy in full flow.

A sweeping power grab in July 2021, when he dissolved parliament and expanded executive power so he could rule by decree, saw Saied jail many of his critics. That decree was later enshrined in a new constitution – ratified by a widely boycotted 2022 referendum – while media figures and lawyers critical of Saied have also been prosecuted and detained under a harsh “fake news” law enacted the same year.

‘Entire case has been a masquerade’

Within the past four months, Tunisia has temporarily suspended the activities of at least 14 Tunisian and international NGOs, said Amnesty, including the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women and the World Organisation against Torture.

Individuals have been similarly targeted.

Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Friday that Tunis’s Court of Appeal will hear on November 17 the appeal of more than 30 people “unjustly sentenced to heavy prison terms in a politically motivated ‘Conspiracy Case’” mass trial in April.

“Four of those detained are on hunger strike, including one who, according to his lawyers, was subjected to physical violence in prison on November 11.”