Tunisia: Revolving Door Shows
Intolerance for Dissent
12 Mar 2009 21:02:04 GMT Source: Human Rights Watch
(New York) - The Tunisian government
released a
long-serving political prisoner only to re-arrest him a few weeks later solely
for expressing his political views to the media, Human Rights Watch said today.Â
Human Rights Watch called for the Tunisian authorities to
abandon the new charges against Sadok Chorou and release him, as a Tunis
appeals court
prepares to hear his case on March 14.
"For expressing his views to the media, Chorou finds
himself back in prison after spending nearly two decades there on dubious
charges," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at
Human Rights Watch. "What are Tunisian authorities afraid of?"
On November 5,
2008, Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine
Ben Ali ordered
the release of the last 21 members
of the banned Islamist Nahdha movement
still detained. All of the freed prisoners reportedly received a "conditional
release," meaning they could be re-imprisoned without a trial
to serve the
remainder of their sentences for unspecified misconduct.
Hundreds of members of Nahdha, including Chorou, had been
imprisoned after they were convicted in
unfair trials for politically motivated
offenses in the early 1990s. But police re-arrested Chorou on December 3, 2008,
after the 61-year-old chemistry professor gave interviews to two
pan-Arab media
outlets, IslamOnline.net on November 8, and London-based Al-Hiwar television on
December 1, about his years in prison and the political situation in Tunisia.
In those
interviews, he urged Tunisian authorities to lift their 17-year-old
ban on an-Nahdha.
In a one-day trial in a Tunis court on December 13, the
judge ruled that these
interviews violated Tunisia's law of associations
prohibiting "maintaining an unrecognized association" (Article 30), namely
an-Nahdha, and sentenced Chorou to one year in
prison. Chorou had argued in
court that he had spoken as an individual in these interviews rather than on
behalf of any organization.
Chorou was president of an-Nahdha
when the authorities
cracked down on the movement in the early 1990s, arresting hundreds of members
and, in 1992, successfully prosecuting 265 of them, including Chorou, in a military court; they convicted them of plotting to overthrow the state and set
up an Islamic republic. Human rights organizations that observed the trial at
the time, including Human
Rights Watch, criticized the proceedings as highly
flawed and
unjust.
Today, Chorou remains in Nador prison, after the court
refused defense motions for his provisional release. When conditionally freed
in November 2008, Chorou
had been serving a 30-year sentence, reduced from the
life sentence the military court originally imposed on him in 1992. He lives in
Mornag, near Tunis.
Shortly after
Ben Ali became president in 1987, an-Nahdha
sought legal recognition as a party. The authorities refused the application
but tolerated the party for a short period, before launching a
crackdown
against it in 1990 and formally outlawing it the following year.
An-Nahdha's leadership-in-exile says it routinely
condemns violence and is committed to using
only democratic and nonviolent
means to achieving a democratic and tolerant Islamic state. It categorically
denies the existence of the coup plot for which its leaders were convicted in
1992. The government continues to claim that an-Nahdha is an extremist group
willing to use violence to install a repressive theocracy.
Tunisia's Organic Law on Political
Parties prohibits (in
Article 3) parties "whose principles, activities and programs are fundamentally
based on a religion." Such a broad restriction violates Tunisia's
obligations
to uphold the right to freedom of association, as a party to the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and does not meet the criteria
for the very
limited exceptions permitted to this right under international
law.
The Tunisian government has never convincingly justified
its continued ban on an-Nahdha, which has
publicly renounced violence since at
least the early 1990s. The courts have imprisoned hundreds of Tunisians since
the 1990s merely for the offense of belonging to, or
"maintaining" an-Nahdha.
The law used to prosecute Chorou provides, "Whoever takes part in maintaining
or re-creating, directly or indirectly, associations that lack legal
status or
that have been dissolved, shall be subject to a term of one to five years in
prison and a fine of one hundred to one thousand dinars (US$70 - 700)."
"[President Ben Ali's
conditional release of an-Nahdha prisoners in November] is a step towards
improving the relationship between an-Nahdha and the state. We hope that
this
will eventually lead to the movement being granted the right to act politically
in a legal framework. ... Now that the last of an-Nahdha's leadership has been
released from
prison, we hope that the movement will regain some of its former
strength. To do this, we must overcome the obstacles before us and begin to
rebuild, hoping that we can restore the popular
support we once had. ... Any initiative
for reconciliation is predicated on the state sincerely and effectively
accepting such an overture. ... But I don't think that the
political demands
of the movement, which can be summarized as being allowed to openly practice
party politics with the aim of reform and change, are open to negotiation or to
being
waived. ... During my time in prison, an-Nahdha had decided that the goal
of its political work was to achieve a comprehensive and inclusive national
reconciliation that restores political
equilibrium and prevents a monopoly by
any one party in deciding the fate of the country."
"Sadok Chorou is behind bars because of an unjust law
criminalizing
membership in associations, unjustly applied by the Tunisian
government to crush dissent," said Whitson. "Prosecutors should drop the case
and allow Chorou his freedom."
