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More than three years into Tunisia’s deepening clampdown on dissent, journalists, lawyers, and opposition figures continue to fill the country’s jails — some beaten, others silenced by fear — as President Kais Saied tightens his grip on power and dismantles what remains of the Arab world’s only democracy to emerge from the 2011 uprisings.
Rights groups are sounding alarms as reports of abuse, hunger strikes, and deaths in custody mount. On Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) urged Tunisian authorities to immediately release Sonia Dahmani, a lawyer and outspoken political critic who has been detained since May after she publicly condemned prison conditions. Her hearing, initially scheduled for this week, was postponed indefinitely.
“Dahmani’s harassment is part of a wider crackdown on press freedom enacted by President Kais Saied in 2022,” CPJ said, calling her case emblematic of how Tunisia’s government has turned laws once meant to protect liberty into tools for repression.
Amnesty International echoed the call, demanding the release of six human rights defenders — including refugee advocate Mustapha Djemal — who were arrested in May for what the group described as “legitimate human rights work.”
In May 2023, the Tunisian government escalated its clampdown on media and civil society, arresting over ten journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders in what Human Rights Watch called an effort to ““[dismantle] Tunisia’s democratic institutions, [undermine] judicial independence, and [stifle] freedom of expression and the press”.
This week, the family of prominent opposition figure Jaouhar Ben Mbarek said he was brutally beaten in prison, suffering broken ribs after guards and inmates allegedly assaulted him to end his hunger strike. Ben Mbarek, co-founder of the National Salvation Front - Tunisia’s largest opposition coalition - has been detained since February 2023.
His case has drawn fresh attention to the deteriorating conditions in Tunisian prisons, where at least three deaths were recorded in July alone. Rights groups say detainees are often denied medical care and held on vague, politically motivated charges.
Since Saied seized emergency powers in 2021 — dissolving Parliament and ruling by decree in what critics call a “self-coup” — Tunisia has slid further into authoritarianism. Once a symbol of democratic hope in the Middle East, it now faces growing international condemnation for the erosion of its civil rights and the silencing of its dissenting voices.
