In the latest sign of deepening repression in what was once virtually the sole Arab democracy, a court in Tunisia has handed down heavy sentences to prominent opposition figures convicted on charges of conspiring against state security, the country’s official news agency said on Saturday.
Rights groups and lawyers have called the charges baseless.
Forty people had been charged in the case, including opposition leaders, lawyers, businessmen, rights activists and journalists. The court handed down prison sentences of 13 to 66 years, the news agency, TAP, said, citing a judicial official. The agency gave no other details.
Tunisia, in North Africa, was the birthplace of the Arab Spring uprisings against authoritarian rule that began in late 2010 and surged across much of the Arab world. But the country has been steadily sliding back into authoritarianism and repression since President Kais Saied moved to institute one-man rule in 2021.
In the decade after the uprising, Tunisia managed to establish democratic elections, a liberated news media and freedom of expression, allowing protests and citizen complaints to flourish. But the economy stagnated, state finances deteriorated, inequalities remained or deepened, and Tunisians grew increasingly divided over the power that political Islamists had accrued in the post-revolution years.
That led many Tunisians to embrace Mr. Saied and his promises of change.
Nearly four years after his power grab, however, Mr. Saied has squandered his popularity on decisions that experts say have only worsened the economic crisis and brought ever-harsher repression.
Journalists, political activists, lawyers and rights groups say that the news media has been largely muzzled and that the once independent judiciary has been forced to carry out Mr. Saied’s will. Many Tunisians fear prosecution for criticizing the government. Mr. Saied has also taken over a number of important, formerly independent government institutions, such as the one overseeing elections.
The government has also ramped up arrests of political opponents and critics of the government. A Human Rights Watch report this week said that more than 50 people were being held, some without charges or trials, on political grounds or for exercising their rights as of January 2025.
“Not since the 2011 revolution have Tunisian authorities unleashed such repression,” Bassam Khawaja, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that accompanied the report. “President Kais Saied’s government has returned the country to an era of political prisoners, robbing Tunisians of hard-won civil liberties.”
Several of the defendants sentenced on Friday, all political activists or politicians, were prosecuted for discussing political strategy or for meeting — or merely arranging meetings — with foreign diplomats or international organizations, a practice that had become routine after the revolution.
Other defendants appeared effectively to have been accused of opposing the government, though the official charges included forming or joining a terrorist group; inciting unrest, attacks, looting or murder; and causing damage to food security and the environment.
Eight of the defendants have been detained since February 2023, when prosecutors first brought the case — all of them high-profile politicians or lawyers who had been involved in mounting an opposition to Mr. Saied. Pretrial detention in Tunisia is supposed to last no longer than 14 months.
More than 20 of the other defendants fled the country before the verdict, while others had remained in Tunisia but had not been in custody. The state news agency reported that the sentences had been “enforced immediately,” however, suggesting that those not in custody may now have been detained.
Vivian Yee is a Times reporter covering North Africa and the broader Middle East. She is based in Cairo.
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