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A Tunisian court docket has handed down jail sentences starting from 13 to 66 years following the trial of 40 opposition politicians and different critics of Kais Saied, the authoritarian president, in keeping with TAP, the nation’s official information company.
The mass trial on broad conspiracy prices is the largest case towards Saied’s opponents since he staged an influence seize in 2021 and set about dismantling the democratic system beneath which he was first elected president in 2019.
Till 2021, Tunisia was seen as the one instance of a profitable democratic transition amongst Arab international locations that rose up towards dictatorship in 2011.
However Saied, a populist who made no secret of his disdain for democracy, dissolved the elected parliament in 2022 and rewrote the structure to interchange it with a toothless meeting unable to problem his monopoly on energy.
The defendants embody dissenters with a spread of political hues, from Islamists to liberals. Many, together with democracy activist Khayyam Turki and opposition politicians Ghazi Chaouachi and Issam Chebbi, have been detained for greater than two years. A few of these sentenced had been making an attempt to unite the opposition to peacefully resist Saied’s destruction of Tunisia’s fledgling democracy.
Round half of these convicted have been tried in absentia as a result of that they had fled the nation earlier than arrest. The sentences may be appealed.
Saied had repeatedly described his jailed critics as traitors who have been pursuing a overseas agenda.
“The trial is a part of the authoritarian drift beneath Saied and of his makes an attempt to counsel that the nation is beneath some exterior siege by foreigners and that solely he can save Tunisia,” mentioned Riccardo Fabiani, north Africa director on the Worldwide Disaster Group.
Dalila Ben Mbarek, a lawyer for the jailed politicians whose brother Jaouhar, a democracy activist, is amongst these sentenced, mentioned the trial lacked any semblance of justice. It was rushed, the defendants weren’t current and defence legal professionals have been denied the fitting to be heard by the court docket, she mentioned. “We knew the court docket resolution was ready upfront and that neither the legislation nor the judiciary had something to do with [it].”
Most leaders of political events in Tunisia have been imprisoned, together with Rached Ghannouchi, the top of Nahda, the reasonable Islamist social gathering which fashioned the most important bloc within the disbanded parliament.
Saied has additionally staged crackdowns towards legal professionals, journalists and enterprise figures.
“These people have been convicted solely for the peaceable train of their human rights,” mentioned Erika Guevara Rosas, Senior Director for Analysis, Coverage, Advocacy and Campaigns at Amnesty Worldwide. “Their trial has been riddled with procedural violations and a blatant disregard of minimal defence rights and was based mostly on unsubstantiated prices.”
