05 Jan 11 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Conventional wisdom suggests that the web’s power to drive social revolution is over-rated, but the Tunisian government still isn’t taking any chances. Its agents are hacking its opponents’ networks and sabotaging them, even as foreign hackers retaliate by doing the same to the state’s own sites. Rohan Jayasekera reports
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09 Oct 10 | Uncategorized
If more evidence was needed of the peculiar concept of justice now playing in Tunisia’s law courts, it was laid out for all to see this week, with one persecuted journalist’s lawyers walking out in protest at the judge’s handling of his case and another reporter – jailed on similarly trumped up charges – left seriously ill by lack of care in prison.
The authorities continue to use the courts as a means of repression against journalists, as the case of journalist Mouldi Zouabi, a journalist with independent Radio Kalima demonstrated this week.
After he was physically attacked in April, police decided not to charge the attacker. Bizarrely, weeks later they chose to charge Zouabi, the victim, with “violent behavior and committing actual bodily harm” against his assailant.
The case was referred to a higher court on 6 October, and he now faces up to two years in jail. His lawyers walked out of the last hearing in protest at what they say are multiple breaches of due process. Tunisia’s politicised judiciary is being used to silence free speech by giving credence to often ludicrous charges and suspect evidence, with dire effects on both journalists and their families.
This week there were renewed concerns for another victim of Tunisia’s politicized judiciary, Fahem Boukaddous, jailed for reporting public demonstrations against unemployment and corruption in the mining town of Gafsa in 2008.
Boukaddous, whose health has sharply deteriorated in prison, is serving a four year jail term following his conviction in March for “forming a criminal association liable to attack persons”.
“We are very concerned about Boukaddous who needs urgent medical treatment unavailable to him in prison,” said Aidan White, International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) General Secretary. “Boukaddous has already been denied his freedom as punishment for his independent journalism. Without immediate action his long term health is under threat.”
The International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG), a coalition of 20 IFEX members, currently chaired by Index on Censorship, has raised repeated concerns about the lack of independence shown by Tunisia’s magistrates and the abuse of the system to target journalists like Mouldi and Boukaddous.
A recent mission by the IFEX-TMG to Tunisia concluded that for nearly a decade the Tunisian state has worked to prevent the establishment of an impartial and independent judiciary, “for the purposes of reinforcing its grip on public dialogue and limiting peaceful critical discourse”.
The state strategy came out in the open in July 2001, when Judge Mokhtar Yahyaoui called on the Tunisian president, in his capacity as Chair of the Superior Council of Magistrates, to recognise that obstructions to an independent judiciary were damaging freedom of expression and democracy in Tunisia.
The independent Tunisian Association of Magistrates (AMT) took a similar line, but when it called for a reform of the law to tackle the issue of judicial independence, its elected nine-member Board, including three women magistrates, were deposed and some reassigned against their will to new courts far away from their homes in Tunis.
The IFEX-TMG group has called on Tunis to cease political interference in the work of the Superior Council of Magistrates, supposed to impartially and independently run the country’s judicial system.
23 Sep 10 | Uncategorized
The alarming letter sent last week by a global coalition of 20 groups affiliated with the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) to the International Association of Judges about the “unabated persecution” of independent judges in Tunisia came as a reminder of the unprecedented deterioration of the country’s judiciary since its independence from France in 1956.
The circle of victims among independent judges has been widening since Judge Mokhtar Yahyaoui was fired in 2001 for writing to President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to denounce “the catastrophic state the Tunisian judiciary has reached” and to urge him to use his constitutional prerogatives to end “all interference with justice and the institutions of the State”.
To this day, Yahyaoui and his family remain harassed by one of the world’s most vengeful police states. Among the retaliatory measures, he is denied the right to earn a living and travel or play any role in the tightly controlled civil society. His daughter, a student in France, had to wait more than two years before she could receive her passport from the Tunisian Embassy in Paris last weekend. His son had to leave a Tunis public school to escape politically motivated persecution.
The Tunisian authorities’ “primitive and thuggish repression”, as the critical judge calls it, only strengthened his determination to resist oppression and to continuously warn against the dangerous consequences of Ben Ali’s policy of humiliating Tunisian judges and turning them into “obedient and fearful government employees.”
It also enhanced his faith in the importance of international pressure and solidarity to help “alleviate the threats and suffering of all those who are today in the crosshair of dictatorship in Tunisia.”
The IFEX Tunisia Monitoring Group letter to the Rome-based International Association of Judges echoes the findings of a report released in Beirut in June entitled “Behind the Façade: How a Politicized Judiciary and Administrative Sanctions Undermine Tunisian Human Rights” .
Unlike his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, who “was a lawyer and a cultivated man,” before leading the country to independence and implementing significant educational, judicial and social reforms, Ben Ali “is a man of the barracks and an army general” inclined, since his 1987 coup, to keep the country’s institutions under his thumb, explains Yahyaoui. “How can you have an independent judiciary when you are deprived of the right to freedom of expression?”
The heavy price paid by Yahyaoui and other brave human rights defenders, such as Mohammad Nouri, Nejib Hosni, Moncef Marzouki, Radhia Nasraoui and Mohammad Abbou, for opposing the use of Tunisian courts to issue unfair rulings and settle scores with dissidents and critical journalists helped raise awareness about the urgent need to reform the decaying judiciary and the rest of the political system. So did the rising and voracious influence of Ben Ali’s family over the country’s political and economic life and its alleged plan to restore hereditary rule, 53 years after the proclamation of the Tunisian Republic.
Attacks on independent judges intensified after the 2002 Soviet-style referendum allowing the amendment of the 1959 Constitution to lift the restrictions which prevented Ben Ali from running for more than three terms as president and granted him immunity from prosecution for life. His advisers are currently paving the way for a new Orwellian campaign to lift the constitutional age limit which precludes the so-called “Architect of Change” from running for president again in 2014.
The eviction in 2005 of the democratically elected board of the Association of Tunisian Judges and its replacement by a puppet board came as no surprise, given the strong commitment of its leading figures to protect their colleagues from political interference and arbitrariness.
It was immediately followed by an unrelenting wave of persecution that saw over the past five years President Ahmad Rahmouni, Secretary General Kalthoum Kennou and other brave judges, including Wassila Kaabi, Raoudha Karafi and Leila Bahria, assigned hundreds of kilometres away from Tunis and their families, denied promotion or deprived of large portions of their salaries, without explanation.
“Why do you think we are subject to such mistreatment? It is simply because our association wanted to ensure certain protection and guarantees to the judge regarding his or her independence, assignment and promotion,” said Kennou.
The lengthy and ruthless persecution of these brave judges apparently does not seem to bother the friends of President Ben Ali in the West, nor has it captured the attention of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers Gabriela Carina Knaul de Albuquerque e Silva.
In a report issued earlier this year, she stressed “the need for continuing education in international human rights law for magistrates, judges, prosecutors, public defenders and lawyers,” as if highly educated judges or lawyers in human rights law could effectively do their job without efficient international pressure on dictators restricting them.
Kamel Labidi is a freelance journalist and leading human rights advocate currently living in Arlington, Virginia. This article originally appeared in the Beirut Daily Star and is republished with permission.
07 Jul 10 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
As statements of contempt for free expression, they don’t come much plainer. This week Tunisia told the world that it defines independent journalism as “spreading news likely to harm public order,” and independent media as “criminal organisations”
On 6 July a Tunisian appeals court confirmed the four-year prison sentence handed down to journalist Fahem Boukadous, simply for doing his job and reporting trade union protests in the provincial city of Gafsa in 2008.
For many members of the Tunisian Monitoring Group (TMG) of IFEX free expression network, the verdict is part of a process of institutionalising state censorship in Tunisia with the help of a sympathetic judiciary. It has strongly condemned the charges.
The TMG is urging the Tunisian authorities to end ongoing harassment of critical journalists and to respect free expression in line with its domestic laws and its ratified commitments to international covenant on civil and political rights.
It also lays down a serious challenge to the European Union to condemn the harassment. Brussels is already hesitating in offering Tunis the special trade relationship already offered to its neighbour Morocco.
The charges brought against Boukadous, which include “belonging to a criminal association” and “harming public order”, appear to be yet another political manoeuvre aiming to silence criticism of Tunisian authorities.
To do it, those same authorities are dragging an innocent sick man through hospitals, courts and jails out of sheer maliciousness. Having exposed the state’s failures in Gafsa in 2008 the state is now making Boukadous suffer for it.
Boukaddous was unable to attend the hearing as he was in a hospital in Sousse where he is being treated for respiratory problems. “There are plainclothes police agents in the hospital pressuring medical staff to release me so that they can take me to prison. Hospital staff are refusing to yield to their pressure”, Boukaddous told the TMG.
Radhia Nasraoui, one of his lawyers, denounced the court ruling as “harsh and unfair” and warned against the “dangerous consequences” of denying Boukaddous the “vital medical care he needs.” She added that several political prisoners have died from a “lack of medical care” over the past years.
Boukadous, a journalist with Al-Hiwar Al-Tunisi satellite television station, went into hiding in July 2008 after discovering that he was wanted by the Tunisian authorities. He was sentenced to six years in prison in December 2008.
In November 2009 he emerged to challenge the sentence on the basis that he had been tried in absentia. A court overturned the previous ruling, but said that Boukadous would again be tried on the same charges. In January of this year, the journalist was found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison, which his lawyers appealed, without avail.
Index on Censorship currently chairs the TMG, which is a group of 20 organisations who belong to the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) network
