Tunisia arrests prominent opponent Hammami to enforce 5-year jail term

Police arrested prominent Tunisian opposition figure Ayachi Hammami at his home on Tuesday to enforce a five-year prison term on a conviction for conspiracy against state security, his family told Reuters.

An appeals court handed down jail terms of up to 45 years last week to dozens of opposition leaders including Hammami, business figures and lawyers on charges of conspiracy to overthrow President Kais Saied.

Critics called the sentences a sign of Saied's increasingly authoritarian rule.

“If you are seeing this video, I have been arrested," Hammami, who served as minister of human rights in 2020, said in a video posted by his family on his Facebook page on Tuesday.

“I have spent years fighting for democracy, freedom, rights. I will turn my cell into a new front of struggle," he said, adding he planned to go on hunger strike.

Police arrested opposition figure Chaima Issa last week at a protest in the capital Tunis to enforce a 20-year prison sentence, in the same case.

The opposition says the charges are fabricated and aim to crush Saied's critics through the judiciary.

Authorities say the defendants, who include former officials and the former head of intelligence, Kamel Guizani, tried to destabilize the country and overthrow Saied.

Saied says he does not interfere with the judiciary, but that no one is above the law, regardless of their position or name.

When the case was launched in 2023, the president said the politicians involved in the case were "traitors and terrorists" and that judges who would acquit them were their accomplices.

Police are also widely expected to arrest Najib Chebbi, the head of the opposition National Salvation Front, the main coalition challenging Saied.

Chebbi received a 12-year prison sentence in the case - which prosecuted 40 people and was one of the largest political prosecutions in Tunisia's recent history.

Twenty of those charged have fled abroad and were sentenced in absentia.

Rights groups said the verdict and sentences were an escalation of Saied's crackdown on dissent since he seized extraordinary powers in 2021. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called for the immediate annulment of the sentences.