Tunisian human rights activist Sihem Bensedrine, one of the country's most prominent opposition figures, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison in cases related to transitional justice, she announced Friday to AFP.
Sihem Bensedrine © TFP
Tunisian human rights activist Sihem Bensedrine, one of the country's most prominent opposition figures, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison in cases related to transitional justice, she announced Friday to AFP.
Bensedrine, a former journalist who served as president of the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD), which heard testimony from thousands of victims of the Bourguiba (1957-1987) and Ben Ali (1987-2011) eras, was prosecuted on suspicion of falsifying part of the commission's final report.
She dismissed the verdict as politically motivated. "This decision has nothing to do with justice. It has to do with a totalitarian regime that wants to eliminate the legacy of the IVD," she declared.
The sentence against one of Tunisia's most respected human rights defenders is the latest in a series of moves by President Kais Saied's government against civil society, opposition figures, journalists and activists since his 2021 power grab. Critics say the prosecution of Bensedrine is a deliberate attempt to discredit the transitional justice process and bury the historical record of abuses committed under the country's previous authoritarian rulers.
For a country that was once held up as the Arab Spring's sole democratic success story, the jailing of a woman who devoted her career to documenting state crimes and seeking justice for victims represents a deeply troubling milestone.
By Badr Zayan
At 51, Binina Mohamed is as old as the conflict that drove her from the Western Sahara region into a refugee camp in southern Algeria, where she has spent her life among tens of thousands of others facing a similar fate.
The 35-year-old UN peacekeeping mission in the Western Sahara region will come to an end after the Security Council failed to renew its mandate, the UN chief said on Sunday.
Egypt's Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said on Saturday he was "extremely worried" that a new escalation in the war between the United States and Iran would be more destructive and have a major impact.
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