Nebil Jridet, General Director of the Arabic-language weekly newspaper Al-Oula has ended his hunger strike.

Jridet spent seven days on hunger strike in protest at Tunisian government’s “unequal” distribution of state advertisements among newspapers. He accuses the government of allocating adverts according to “newspapers’ political affiliations”.

The director’s decision came after talks with Samir Dilou, Minister of Human Rights and Transitional Justice on 15 May. Dilou said: “the state advertisement issue is a just cause and requires all concerned parties’ efforts in order to come up with the solutions which would make the distribution of state ads among newspapers a transparent process”.

In exchange, a national conference addressing state advertisement matters will be held at the end of the month. The National Syndicate for Tunisia Journalists and the National Syndicate for Independent and Party Newspapers will head the conference.

“It will take much time and we are going through serious financial problems which might come in the way of issuing the newspaper in the upcoming weeks” Nebil Jridet told Index.