14 Jan 2011 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
It’s no surprise that the Western media was a little slow to catch up to the unrest in Tunisia. The tiny country sandwiched between Libya and Algeria has always been notoriously opaque to outsiders.
Known as one of the world’s most quietly repressive regimes, Tunisia seems to actively discourage outside coverage. Several foreign correspondents have told me of reporting trips to Tunisia where any attempt they made to hold an actual conversation with a normal citizen was immediately broken up by heavy-handed security forces.
So it took a little while for the international community to grasp the significance of the current spasm of civil unrest that continues to rock the country. When 26 year old street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi publicly set himself on fire in mid-December to protest his inability to earn a living wage, it touched a nerve throughout the country and set off a wave of protests that has already spread to Algeria and is being closely watched by governments and civilians throughout the region.
The government’s reaction has been to clamp down hard on the flow of information. At least two Tunisian bloggers have been arrested, as well as one young rapper who dared to record a song critical of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. One of the arrested bloggers, Slim Amamou, cleverly managed to get word of his arrest out by using electronic ingenuity. Amamou posted his wherabouts on the Foursquare social network, which allows for geolocation of his phone. The network revealed his location to be inside the Tunisian Ministry of Interior.
The struggle is already playing out online, with both sides engaging in cyber-attacks. A group of international “hacktivists” operating under the collective name Anonymous has been targeting government websites with denial-of-service attacks. The government has apparently responded by hacking into the email accounts and Facebook pages of known activists, bloggers and journalists.
Despite the government moves to control the online information flow, cyberspace continues to be fertile ground for information and images documenting the unrest. The group blog Nawaat has become a thriving online clearing house for new information and videos—some of them graphically depicting the bloodshed in the streets.
10 Jan 2011 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
At least 14 protesters have been killed in violent demonstrations in the cities of Tala, Kasserine and Rgeb since Saturday amidst continuing anti-government protests. In Tala the Tunisian security force allegedly started firing at protesters who were setting fire to a government building. The Tunisian government has arrested bloggers, lawyers and activists since anti-government demonstrations began in December.
5 Jan 2011 | 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 2010 | 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.
