Tunisian authorities have stepped up harassment of human rights activists in the past week, Human Rights Watch said today.
Former political prisoner Abdullah Zouari received a nine-month sentence August 29 after a politically motivated prosecution on charges of violating a ministerial order. The next day, disabled ex-political prisoner Lassad Jouhri was beaten on a Tunis street by four men in plainclothes – an attack that mimicked two prior assaults on him by state security officers. Both men had been openly helpful in providing information to human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch. “Abdullah Zouari and Lassad Jouhri have called attention to the dire plight of Islamist prisoners and ex-prisoners,” said Hanny Megally, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division. “In Tunisia, that sort of human rights work is especially dangerous.”
Human Rights Watch urged Tunisian authorities to release Zouari from prison and lift all restrictions on his liberties. It also called for a criminal investigation into the assault against Jouhri.
Tunisian authorities have increased their repression of dissidents and human rights defenders over the past decade. Dissidents are frequently subjected to heavy police surveillance, travel bans, dismissals from work, interruptions in phone service, harassment of family members, and a refusal to legalize most independent rights organizations. Human rights lawyers and activists have been assaulted on the street by plainclothesmen acting in complete impunity. Their property has been subject to vandalism, and their homes and offices to suspicious break-ins. The government has also used the courts, which lack independence, to convict and imprison critics of its rights record.
Background
On August 29, after a trial lasting only a few minutes, a district judge in Jerjis, in the south of Tunisia, ordered Zouari to serve a nine-month sentence; the judge denied his request for release pending an appeal. Zouari’s lawyers, who protested that they had been prevented from meeting their client prior to the trial, argued that Zouari had not violated the terms of the order confining him to the province of Medenine and that the prosecution was politically motivated.
Zouari, who has been held in Harboub prison in southern Tunisia since his arrest on August 17, has now been convicted on three separate occasions since June 2002, when he completed an 11-year sentence on charges of “membership in an illegal organization.” Zouari was a senior editor and writer at the time with al-Fajr, a publication linked to Tunisia’s Nahdha (Renaissance) party, an Islamist movement that has been ruthlessly repressed since the early 1990s. Since his release in 2002, he contributed essays for various Internet publications and recently wrote that he would attempt to resurrect al-Fajr online.
When sentenced to 11 years in prison, Zouari was also ordered placed under “administrative control” upon his release, a punishment that restricts the liberties of ex-prisoners. However, Zouari in 2002 filed a challenge to the legality of the Interior Ministry order banishing him to Medenine, a remote southern district far from his family in Tunis. His appeal has yet to be ruled upon.
Since 2002, Zouari has encouraged international protest against his banishment. He has also drawn attention to the plight of other victims of rights abuses, assisting a delegate of Human Rights Watch to meet with victims and their families in the south of the country in early August.
Zouari was convicted in August 2002 and sentenced to eight months in prison for disobeying his administrative control order – the same violation of Article 150 of the criminal code for which he has now been convicted a second time. Zouari served two months of that first sentence before his release in November 2002 for “humanitarian reasons.” Zouari was convicted again in July 2003 and sentenced to four months in prison for “libel” after a dispute with the owner of an Internet café who Zouari said had denied him entry. Zouari has appealed that decision.
On August 30 at about 11:30 a.m., four men in plainclothes assaulted Lassad Jouhri in front of the downtown Tunis office of Mohamed Nouri, president of the one-year-old International Association for the Support of Political Prisoners (Association internationale de soutien aux prisonniers politiques, AISPP). Jouhri has been a key intermediary between prisoners and their families, on the one hand, and those seeking information about human rights conditions in Tunisia. As in two previous similar incidents, assailants beat Jouhri without being stopped, and have not since been identified or arrested.
Jouhri was among several human rights activists assaulted by plainclothes policemen on December 13, 2002 outside the office of another AISPP member, lawyer Saïda Akremi. And on August 28, 2002, five men in plainclothes beat Jouhri on a street in downtown Tunis, breaking one of his crutches and using it to strike him. The men refused to identify themselves to Jouhri. However, when ordering a uniformed policeman not to intervene, they identified themselves as security agents. Jouhri limps due to injuries he sustained under torture in Tunisian prisons.
Tunisian authorities have refused to legalize the AISPP since its founders applied for legal recognition in November 2002. In early August 2003, AISPP President Mohamed Nouri and Mokhtar Yahiaoui, president of another unrecognized human rights organization, the Tunisian Center for an Independent Judiciary, appeared in a Tunis court to answer charges of knowingly disseminating “false information.” The case is continuing.
In addition, vandals damaged on August 26 the car belonging to AISPP co-founder Samir Ben Amor, a Tunis-based human rights attorney. The car, which Ben Amor had purchased a few days earlier, was the only vehicle that was defaced in the private lot where it had been parked. Cars belonging to a number of human rights activists in Tunis have in the past been vandalized or stolen. Ben Amor had been openly helpful to Human Rights Watch during its August visit to Tunisia. He has filed a complaint with the Tunis police regarding the damage.
