Eric Goldstein is the former deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division.
In December 2013, Tunisia became the first country in the Middle East and North Africa to launch a full-blown national truth and reconciliation commission to probe past repression. Coming three years after the outbreak of popular protests that toppled longtime autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and ignited the so-called Arab Spring, the creation of Tunisia's Truth and Dignity Commission, or TDC, was a landmark in the country's nascent democratic transition.
A lot has changed in the decade since then. Last month, Tunisia became perhaps the first country in the world to take the person who headed its truth commission, Sihem Bensedrine, and toss her in prison. This dubious distinction speaks volumes about how thoroughly President Kais Saied, who faces re-election next month in a vote that has little chance of being free or fair, has reversed the achievements of the Tunisian revolution. (Morocco is the only other country in the Middle East and North Africa that has had a truth commission. While the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission exposed past abuses and compensated and rehabilitated victims, it was a top-down initiative established under King Mohammed VI during an era of regime continuity rather than regime change, and had no mandate to name perpetrators.)
Bensedrine was not surprised when the police arrested her on August 1, according to her husband, activist and journalist Omar Mestiri. She had been under investigation since 2021 on dubious charges relating to her mentorship of the TDC and banned from leaving the country since 2023. Besides, she was no stranger to detention: Her lifelong activism had landed her in jail twice before, once under the country's first president, Habib Bourguiba, in 1987, and once under its second, Ben Ali, in 2001.
Bensedrine's arrest makes her the first non-Islamist to go to jail for their political views under all three of Tunisia's autocratic presidents, a record she shares with Ennahda party leaders like Ali Laarayedh. The trial on trumped-up charges of Laarayedh, who served as interior minister and prime minister during the post-2011 interval between the Ben Ali and Saied presidencies, is set to begin in October, 22 months after his detention. The imprisoned 83-year-old chief of Ennahdha, Rachid Ghannouchi, served time under Bourguiba but avoided prison under Ben Ali by exiling himself during the latter's entire 23-year-long rule.
Bensedrine stands accused of accepting a bribe to "falsify" the TDC's voluminous final report by improperly inserting a mention favorable to a group of business people who were suing state institutions. The mention concerned the long-festering case of the Franco-Tunisian Bank, which an international arbitration body was examining at the time that the truth commission issued its report.
That the accusation, which Bensedrine denies, involves the bank affair reflects the fact that the TDC had a mandate that extended to economic crimes and corruption, in addition to the more customary business of truth commissions of looking into torture, arbitrary detentions, disappearances and sexual violence carried out by security forces. The logic behind this wide mandate was that corruption had been so pervasive under Ben Ali's regime that no effort to reckon with the past could ignore it. Unsurprisingly, exposing and documenting specific economic crimes was the aspect of the TDC's work that stoked the most controversy and resistance from powerful political and business interests.
The TDC's report charged that loans made without collateral to cronies of Ben Ali had helped to sap the Franco-Tunisian Bank's net worth. Moreover, according to the commission, the state was now spurning offers of a reasonable out-of-court settlement with the litigants in order to protect senior officials and their acquaintances implicated in the scandal. In refusing to settle, the state risked a ruinous financial judgment against it, the truth commission said. (In 2023, the arbitration body ruled on the case and ordered the state to pay the litigants a sum more modest than feared.)
The charge against Bensedrine of "falsifying" a report whose preparation she oversaw as president of the truth commission is absurd. So is using it as basis to deny the 73-year-old her pretrial freedom. A statement criticizing her arrest signed by 22 human rights organizations called her prosecution "a flagrant violation" of Tunisia's transitional justice law, which states, in Article 69, "No member or staff members of the Commission…shall be held responsible for the contents of the reports, the conclusions, the opinions, or the recommendations expressed in application of the present law."
Last month, Tunisia became perhaps the first country in the world to take the person who headed its truth and reconciliation commission, Sihem Bensedrine, and toss her in prison.
- Eric Goldstein
There is no shortage of absurd charges to go around in the Tunisia of President Saied. The authorities have wielded the charges of "plotting against state security" and "spreading false news" to jail dozens of opposition and civil society activists since Saied carried out his "self-coup" in July 2021, when he suspended the elected parliament and set about dismantling Tunisia's fragile democratic institutions, rewriting the constitution and undermining judicial independence.
The jailing of Bensedrine serves more than one purpose. It plunges another dagger into the transitional justice process, which most of Tunisia's political class had been sabotaging since before Saied won presidential elections in 2019. More specifically, the charge that the head of the commission is financially corrupt is calculated to discredit the anti-corruption mission of the TDC.
But authorities had Bensedrine in their sights for reasons that go behind her direction of the TDC. Her detention aims to silence one of the country's most steadfast critics of human rights abuses and of Saied's descent into authoritarianism.
The TDC started with grand ambitions. Created by a 2013 organic law on transitional justice, the independent, state-funded body was tasked with documenting human rights abuses and economic crimes committed between 1955—when Tunisia became self-governing before achieving full independence from France a year later—and 2013. The commission would also develop a plan to provide reparations to those who suffered human rights abuses during this period; present proposals to parliament on how to reform institutions in order to prevent a return to dictatorship and its systematic abuses; and turn over to the courts evidence that could be used to prosecute perpetrators. To achieve its lofty mission, the law gave the commission access to state archives and the power to summon anyone it deemed useful to its mission. The transitional justice law also created "specialized courts" to try past human rights abuses.
As the commission got underway, Tunisia's then-president, Moncef Marzouki, a veteran human rights activist, supported this transitional justice process. His successor, Béji Caid-Essebsi—who had served in both the Ben Ali and Bourghiba regimes—did not hide his disdain for it. (The final report named Essebsi for his role in violations when serving as head of state security under Bourguiba.)
Bensedrine persevered despite formidable obstacles that the TDC encountered, including non-cooperation from state institutions, enactment of a law promoted by Essebsi when he was president to narrow the commission's purview, and relentless character assassination against her in certain media. Even Ennahdha, the Islamist party whose long-persecuted members stood to gain the most from recognition of and reparations for past abuses, muted its support of the commission, preferring to play transitional justice instead as a bargaining chip with other political forces.
After the commission spent five years receiving and reviewing 62,000 complaints, conducting 50,000 interviews, holding 14 public hearings and referring more than 170 cases of grave abuses to Tunisia's new specialized courts, Bensedrine presented its 2,000-page final report in April 2020. The report documented savage torture, disappearances and deaths in detention over many decades. Among other abuses, it also exposed the sexual assault and harassment of wives and daughters of political prisoners. The report named some 10,000 victims and made recommendations for governmental reforms to safeguard against the return of dictatorship and such human rights abuses in Tunisia.
The transitional justice law required parliament to develop a plan to implement these recommendations. But by the time the commission presented them, the transitional justice process was already on life support. Parliament proceeded to do nothing on the commission's recommendations for security and judicial sector reforms. The proposed reparations fund for victims was never established. And prosecutions before the specialized courts languished as the police refused to deliver accused perpetrators who ignored summons to appear in court.
Despite the setbacks, the truth commission created a formidable historical record, which was subsequently published in the government's Official Gazette, of how the machinery of the state had been mobilized, from Tunisia's independence onward, to snuff out dissent and terrorize the population. The TDC also performed a huge public service by organizing public hearings in different cities that were broadcast live on state television and riveted Tunisians. Never before had the victims of repression been given a national platform to describe, in the Tunisian dialect of Arabic, their suffering.
After completing her mandate as commission president, Bensedrine went back to her life-long role as a fearless critic of repression. Last year, she wrote an op-ed in The Guardian under the headline: "A poisonous dictatorship has been built in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab spring." It was the kind of grim snapshot of Tunisia under Saied that is normally written by Tunisians in exile, not by an activist in Tunis who, just one month earlier, had been banned from traveling abroad. "In 18 months," she lamented, "President Saied has torched every liberal institution Tunisians have painstakingly built."
Bensedrine's activism began in the 1980s with the Tunisian League for Human Rights, one of the oldest independent human rights organizations in the Arab world. After Ben Ali weakened the League through a series of legal maneuvers and harassment of its members, Bensedrine co-founded the National Council on Liberties in Tunisia (CNLT). It quickly outshined the League in publishing reports that named perpetrators and highlighted the repression of suspected Islamists, something the League at the time had hesitated to do, despite the fact that the repression against Islamists was fiercer than against any other group.
The CNLT, which authorities under Ben Ali refused to legalize, operated out of an apartment rented by Bensedrine and Mestiri on a one-block street in downtown Tunis, between Avenue de la Liberté and the tram tracks at Place de la République. As I witnessed several times during the late 1990s and 2000s, plainclothes policemen lurked on that little block day and night, monitoring who visited the apartment. Whenever the CNLT tried to convene its members, an extra phalanx of cops showed up to block access to the building and assault men and women who did not immediately disperse. Police beat Bensedrine more than once on that street, and elsewhere across Tunis.
Bensedrine's detention aims to silence one of Tunisia's most steadfast critics of human rights abuses and of Saied's descent into authoritarianism.
- Eric Goldstein
When Bensedrine was first detained back in 1987 for opposition political activities, she was freed after two weeks in a presidential amnesty. In 2001, Tunisian authorities arrested her at the airport in Tunis as she disembarked from a flight from Europe, where she had denounced judicial corruption in an interview with an Arabic-language television station. Charged with insulting the judiciary and spreading "false information," she was held for seven weeks and then released and never tried.
Bensedrine's activism knew many forms. She ran a publishing house called Editions Aloes that authorities shut down in 2000 for hosting "unauthorized meetings" and "disturbing the public order." In 2004, she and Mestiri co-authored a book titled Europe and Its Despots, denouncing European complicity with Ben Ali and other authoritarian heads of state from Morocco to Syria. Later that decade, she co-launched an online journal called Kalima, whose website was hosted abroad and blocked in Tunisia. In 2008, she opened with Mestiri an independent online radio station, Radio Kalima. The authorities harassed its staff and refused to license it.
Bensedrine's current arrest comes on the eve of presidential elections in which the once-independent election commission, which Saied has brought to heel, has disqualified nearly all of the politicians likely to pose any serious threat to Saied's re-election. It then defied a ruling by an administrative court ordering the reinstatement of three of those candidates. In the end, the election commission authorized only two candidates to run against Saied. One of them—Ayachi Zammel, a relatively little-known businessman and former lawmaker—was detained on September 2. He is under investigation for forging the endorsements needed to run, charges his campaign denies. The other approved presidential candidate, Zouhair Maghzaoui, who heads a small Arab nationalist party, until recently backed most of Saied's dismantling of Tunisia's democratic institutions.
At least eight political figures who tried to run as candidates against Saied have been convicted and sentenced to prison terms or lifetime bans on running for election. Two others who might have run, party chiefs Issam Chebbi and Ghazi Chouachi, have been in prison since 2023. In eliminating virtually all candidates, Saied may have drawn inspiration from Ben Ali who, when seeking re-election in 1994, jailed the two candidates who dared run against him and claimed a victory with 100 percent of the votes.
One of those candidates in 1994 was Marzouki, who was released after three months and then lived for years under state surveillance. He eventually fled into a long period of exile in 2001. Marzouki returned to Tunisia immediately after Ben Ali's ouster and ran successfully for president in 2011. Now Marzouki is back in exile; since Saied's self-coup in 2021, courts have handed the former president two prison terms in absentia on bogus charges.
The trajectories of both Marzouki and Bensedrine over the past three decades illustrate how political repression has come full circle in Tunisia. There are notable differences between the two eras. Ben Ali obsessively, almost comically, groomed Tunisia's image in the West as a haven of human rights and bulwark against extremism. This involved extensive PR and diplomatic efforts to deceive Western allies, or at least give them a cover for cozying up to such a brutal regime.
Saied seems far less concerned than Ben Ali with Tunisia's image abroad or insisting it is a bastion for human rights. There are multiple reasons why. Saied has what some have called a "messianic" vision of his rule and is less concerned with seducing international public opinion. He is also more anti-Western in his public discourse than Ben Ali and places more value on Tunisia's relations with the Gulf states, whose largesse Saied relies on, and Egypt. There is also the decline in the interest shown by Western governments for human rights in the Middle East and North Africa, as they focus more on ensuring Tunisia's cooperation in combating crime, terrorism and, especially, irregular migration to Europe across the Mediterranean.
This disengagement is sadly in evidence since the arrest of Bensedrine last month. Despite the fact that senior diplomats of the United States, France and the European Union all met regularly with her over the past three decades as part of their monitoring of civil society and human rights in Tunisia, not one has yet to say a word publicly about her detention.
