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For the detractors of the Tunisian President Kais Saied, the Essay of more than 40 opposition figures is clearly another nail in the coffin of the country’s democracy – and the rule of law.
The defendants of the trial – who resumed Friday after being adjourned on the day of its opening on March 4 – are some of the main criticisms of the government. They include former diplomats, media personalities and members of what was once the biggest party in Parliament, the “Muslim Democrat” Ennahda.
And yet, they are faced with accusations such as “conspiracy against the state” and “belonging to a terrorist group”, accusations which were denounced on the first day of the trial as a absurdity “by the defense lawyer Abdelaziz Essid.
One of those who have been judged – in absentia – in what has become known as “conspiracy” is even the French intellectual, Bernard -Henri Levy, accused of being a conduit between the accused and the foreign parties.
The information on precise details of the test remain cloudy, the exact number of those in trials and the specific charges with which they are faced.
The mass trial was denounced both in the streets of Tunis, where hundreds of people went down to the streets on Wednesday, and by observers and analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera and describe the legal proceedings as another example of the deliberate sileting of Saied.
Defective trial
Rights defense groups, including Human Rights Watch (HRW), criticized the mass trial as proof of an “armed” judicial system and a new repression of fundamental freedoms. In the preparation of the trial, the United Nations criticized the government, appealing it in a statement earlier this year to “put an end to all forms of persecution of adversaries and activists”.
The Tunisian Ministry of Foreign Affairs then criticized what he said to be “inaccuracies” in the United Nations press release.
In February, nine of the accused faced with the trial were tried “too dangerous” to attend their trial in person.
Six of them, including the main opposition figurine Jaouhar Ben Mbarek and a former Ennahdha chief, Abdelhamid Jelassi, have taken place since February 2023.
I mbarek started a hunger strike on March 30 to protest against his exclusion from his trial.
He was joined Wednesday by five other defendants excluded from their trial – the aforementioned Jelassi, the politicians Issam Chebbi, Khayam Turki and Ghazi Chaouachi and the lawyer Ridha Belhaj.
All the accused have faced long prison terms if they are found guilty, until the death penalty, which has been suspended in Tunisia since 1991.
“President Saied armed Tunisia’s judicial system to continue opponents and political dissidents, throwing people in arbitrary detention on fragile evidence and pursuing them abusive prosecution,” said Bassam Khawaja, assistant in the Middle East and North Africa in HRW, Al Jazeera.
Weakening the judiciary
Increased government control over the judiciary has many observers worried whether the defendants of the trial have a realistic chance of being found innocent, even if the evidence against them is weak.
Doubts on the independence of the judiciary of Tunisia have increased from Saied dissolved the country’s judicial council In 2022, then replaced him with a body on which he had more control.
What internal resistance remained at the Changes de Saied ended in June of the same year, When he rejected 57 judgesSaying to a television audience that he had “given the opportunity after the opportunity and the warning after warning the judiciary to purify himself”.
“The conspiracy trial is a living example of the way in which the prosecutor’s office and the courts is used as a tool to crush dissent and to repress the rule of law and fundamental freedoms,” Benarbia said of the International Commission of Jurists in Al Jazeera.
“Prolonged and arbitrary detention before the trial, the lack of credible evidence and the order prohibiting some of the accused from attending their own trial in person, probably on the injustice and the politicized nature of the conspiracy trial,” he said.
More a success
Tunisia had been celebrated as one of the few successes of the revolutions of the 2011 “Arab Spring”, with a strong political commitment among its members of public and civil society, which frequently brought to the waves and streets to make their voices heard.
The years that followed the Revolution, which overthrew the longtime autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben, saw the growth of a healthy political system with many elections declared free and fair by international observers.
But a weak economy and the strengthening of anti-democratic forces led to a decline, capped by the rejection of the government’s Saied and the dissolution of the Parliament in 2021 and 2022.
He has since governed by presidential decree and rewrites the constitution of the country, anchoring the power of the presidency.
In addition to this centralization of power has been a purge of Saied adversaries, including politicians and eminent personalities within militant groups formerly booming in Tunisia.
Among these targeted figures of Ennahda such as the leader and the former President of the Parliament Rached GhannouchiFormer Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi, former Minister of Justice Noureddine Bhiri, said Ferjani, a member of the party’s political executive. But the repression has also struck numerous non-ennahda figures, notably ABIR Moussi, a former support from Ben Ali and a fierce critic of Ennahda, and Abderrazek Krimi, project director of the Tunisian refugee council.
Ferjani, Bhiri and Moussi are all among the defendants of the current mass test.
The abolition of the opposition of Tunisia also accompanied other efforts denounced by the rights groups.
In September 2022, SIEED adopted a decree criminalizing any “false news” widespread by electronic means, with the responsibility of deciding what was “false” falling into the increasingly obedient judicial system.
Under this law, more than 60 people, Including journalists, lawyers and opposition personalities, were prosecuted for public speech deemed legally false, said Zied Dabber, head of the National Union of Tunisian journalists, quoted by the AFP news agency last year, the vast majority of them for having criticized Saied and his administration.
“People are afraid and people are tired,” said Tunisian author Hatem Nafti, who now lives in Paris, Al Jazeera.
“People know they can go to prison for nothing,” he said.
“Fear is not new in Tunisia. I lived the first part of my life under Ben Ali,” he said about the president of Tunisia from 1987 to 2011. But Nafti said that under Ben Ali Tunnisiens knew that the red lines surrounded the president and the ruling system largely, when now, it was less clear what would make a person who would fall the fault of the authorities.
“If you have criticized him (Ben Ali), you went to prison. Now there are no rules,” said Nafti.
He underlined his friends, such as the Brandon on the left Hamma Hammami, who regularly criticizes Saied but who remains in Liberty, and others, like the lawyer Sonia Dahmani, who faces a trial today for apparently harmless comments during a talk show.
“There are no rules, nothing,” said Nafti about the current administration, “and I think that makes people more afraid.”
