The Tunisian government should cease its ongoing campaign of harassment against a leading human rights defender and professor of public health, Human Rights Watch said.
In a letter to President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the Academic Freedom Committee of Human Rights Watch said that Dr. Moncef Marzouki faces trial on December 30 on spurious charges of "belonging to an illegal organization" and "disseminating false information." The charges reflect his advocacy of democratic reforms as spokesperson for the National Council on Liberties in Tunisia (CNLT), an independent human rights group.
The Academic Freedom Committee, a group of prominent academics and scholars, called on President Ben Ali to carry out his recent pledge to respect international human rights standards, and asked the president to stop his government's use of physical violence, unwarranted criminal prosecution, and punitive administrative measures to silence its academic critics.
Dr. Marzouki has already lost his ability to earn his livelihood after being fired by the Ministry of Public Health, following highly arbitrary administrative procedures, from his teaching position at the University of Sousse on July 29, 2000. On December 15, plainclothes police officers physically assaulted Professor Mohammed Bechri, a professor at the faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Sousse, when he and several companions attempted to present a petition to the Ministry protesting Dr. Marzouki's dismissal.
"Tunisia should not be chosen to host the World Information Summit if the government punishes scholars and teachers for receiving or sharing their knowledge," said Zia-Zarifi. "These continuing attacks clearly violate the intellectual freedoms at the heart of the information age."
The Human Rights Watch Academic Freedom Committee includes co-chairs Yolanda Moses, President of the American Association for Higher Education, and Jonathan F. Fanton, former president of the New School for Social Research in New York. The committee membership includes the current and past presidents of Harvard University, Columbia University and over a dozen other universities in the United States, as well as internationally prominent academics such as Lord Ralf Dahrendorf of St. Antony's College at Oxford, Krzysztof Michalski of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Ariel Dorfman of Duke University, John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard University, and Fang Lizhi of the University of Arizona.
