Tunisia cracks down on dissent ahead of vote

Tunisia’s autocratic leader Kais Saied has launched a new crackdown on dissent, targeting lawyers, journalists and civil society activists ahead of presidential elections later this year.

A court in Tunis on Wednesday evening sentenced two radio journalists to a year in prison over political comments they had made on social media and the radio.

“We have now entered a logic of criminalising opinion,” Ziad Debbar, the head of the Tunisian journalists’ union, said on local radio station Mosaic FM.

At least 10 people have been arrested this month in what Amnesty International has called an “unprecedented repressive clampdown” on civil society figures.

Detainees include officials in non-governmental groups helping undocumented migrants from sub-Saharan African countries.

Debbar criticised a 2022 law on cyber crime that has increasingly been used against journalists and other dissidents.

Elected in 2019, Saied staged a wide-ranging power grab in 2021 and has since systematically dismantled the country’s young democracy, imprisoning opponents and changing the constitution to concentrate authority in his hands.

Until 2021, Tunisia was seen as the only democracy to have emerged from the Arab uprisings of 2011.

Presidential elections are due later this year, but no date has been announced and it is not clear whether Saied will face any serious challengers under new rules allowing him to handpick members of the electoral commission.

Despite the increased authoritarianism, Tunisia is due to receive up to €278mn from the EU until 2027 to manage migration, and separately received €150mn in budget support in March. The country is a key departure point for irregular migrants seeking to reach Europe via boats to Italy.

The European Commission said this month it was concerned about the wave of arrests.

Those detained in the crackdown include Sonia Dahmani, an outspoken lawyer and television commentator, who had made sarcastic remarks casting doubt on assertions by the president that sub-Saharan migrants wanted to settle in Tunisia.

Saied claimed last year that his country was the target of a plot to change its demographic composition by bringing in people from sub-Saharan countries. His remarks sparked a wave of violent attacks against migrants.

Dahmani’s arrest on May 11 was captured on video. Footage of hooded men dragging her out of the headquarters of the bar association provoked outrage among lawyers, who staged a one-day strike on Monday.

Dalila Ben Mbarek, a lawyer, whose brother is among pro-democracy opposition politicians imprisoned by Saied last year, said journalists, lawyers and other critics of the president felt threatened.

“We all consider ourselves temporarily free,” she said, adding that there was “a systematic effort to tarnish” people taking an independent stand or supporting human rights. “They are being accused of being traitors and being agents for foreign countries.”

The crackdown has extended to civil society groups working with migrants including Mnemty and the Tunisian chapter of Terre d’Asile, a French group. They complain their staffers have been harassed and interrogated over funding. Saied himself has called civil society groups “traitors” and claimed they are “driven by foreign wages”.

The head of Mnemty, Saadia Mesbah, a Black Tunisian anti-discrimination activist, was arrested in a money-laundering investigation this month.

“If you look at all the people who have been summoned, it is all for financial reasons. But if you look closer . . . they have all helped migrants,” said an employee of a Tunis-based NGO that works with migrants, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals.

“We are preparing. Everyone is going to have to face this,” the person said. “We are afraid . . . that helping people will become a crime. The majority of our partners have already been summoned. They are in prison.”

An employee of another Tunisian NGO said they left the country last month after receiving threats, and after authorities repeatedly questioned them about their funding and searched their offices. The questioning intensified after the NGO filed a complaint on behalf of an imprisoned migrant.

“He said he was sold to [Libyan militias] by the Tunisian national guard,” the employee said. “We received a message from him, saying that he was being tortured and in a prison in Libya. They demanded a ransom of €1000 to free him. About 50 other prisoners were also taken [from Tunisia] to Libya.”

The Tunisian authorities have carried out widespread arrests of migrants and refugees in recent months and expelled them to Algeria or Libya, according to diplomats, international organisations and NGOs. The Tunisian foreign ministry has previously denied violating the rights of migrants.