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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18 Dec 10 | Middle East and North Africa
Cynical observers might conclude that the Tunisian government got off lightly when the International Association of Judges (IAJ) recently passed judgement on the country’s politically manipulated and abused judicial system.
The regime’s majority control of Tunisia’s Superior Council of Magistrates (SCM) – the body that appoints, assigns and disciplines the country’s judges – not only breaks every basic principle of the independence of the judiciary as central to the rule of law. It cracks Tunisia’s original constitutional rights and runs directly counter to the guiding principles of the IAJ itself.
That led some to hope that SCM’s bald contempt for its standards might earn it censure. Instead IAJ president Fatoumata Diakite of Cote d’Ivoire handed the regime a get out of jail free card, ruling itself out of the debate and declaring the serial abuses of Tunisia’s SCM an ‘internal matter’.
This is not to say the IAJ don’t know how badly the SCM is behaving. Diakite’s IAJ Presidency did say that if the SCM was led by a majority of judges elected by their peers and not by the government, and didn’t have the country’s justice minister as its vice president, this would “strengthen the rule of law in the country and all judges and civil society would benefit from it.” It’s just that they don’t appear to care.
Since Tunisian judge Mokhtar Yahyaoui first wrote in 2001 warning that political interference in the country’s judiciary threatened the rule of law there – and was sacked, censored and his family punished for his advice – the government has worked to ensure that their judges deliver the verdicts they want against the critics they target.
When the Association of Tunisian Magistrates (AMT) agreed with Yahyaoui, its offices were closed by the Ministry of Justice and steps taken to weed out defenders of judicial independence. Index on Censorship and International PEN, in Tunisia for International Human Rights Day, visited some of the victims this month.
Kalthoum Kennou
Among them was Kalthoum Kennou, ordered by the SCM to be relocated to the southern town of Tozeur against her will in punishment for her support for an independent judiciary. Women judges like Kennou on the AMT have particularly suffered from retaliation. Yet while conceding “that the security of tenure of judges is a fundamental principle,” the IAJ still declined to step up defend them.
Index chairs the International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG) an alliance of 20 free speech groups. The TMG has reported repeated abuses of the law to punish journalists and silence free speech, as politically-motived judges give credence to ludicrous charges and suspect evidence.
Journalist Fahem Boukaddous was jailed for “forming a criminal association liable to attack persons,” simply for reporting public protests against unemployment and corruption in the mining region of Gafsa in 2008. Radio Kalima reporter Mouldi Zouabi was attacked in April but later police bizarrely charged him, the victim, with “violent behavior and committing actual bodily harm” against his assailant.
Index on Censorship has advised the IAJ to repeat its disappointing 2008 investigation into the Tunisian situation, which Diakite was a part of, but with a stricter outlook. Not least the IAJ should expect the AMT to abide by IAJ Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary and the Universal Charter of the Judge, approved in 1999, and for the AMT to act to bring Tunisian legislation into line with international standards.
Few expect this weekend’s AMT sessions in Tunis to discuss the declining independence of the judiciary or open its eyes to the kind of persecution meted out to independent judges – transfers to remote areas, denials of promotion, unjustified salary cuts, travel restrictions, etc. Quiet obedience to the Ministry of Justice will save some their jobs, and save their children from losing their travel and education rights.
The question for 2011 is not just whether judges inside and outside the country will continue to ignore the abuses of the system, but how the European Union will regard it. Tunisia is currently wooing the EU in pursuit of a special agreement with the economic giant on trade and aid.
The cynics might argue that business takes precedence over human rights in the wider scale of things. But who else but an independent Tunisian judge can protect EU business investors from the kind of random top-level corruption recently alleged by US diplomats quoted by WikiLeaks?
EU business interests with millions to put in in Tunisia’s care may make the strongest case yet for an independent Tunisian judiciary.
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.
