Sihem Bensedrine was arrested on 1 August 2024. The human rights activist and former journalist was expecting it. She had been banned from leaving Tunisia since March 2023.
Last week, on the anniversary of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s flight to Saudi Arabia in 2011 following a month of protest, the 74-year-old announced she was going on hunger strike after more than five months in pre-trial detention.
She is being prosecuted in five cases, ranging from a tax adjustment, and the violation of archives legislation to contested arbitrations conducted by the Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC), which she presided over from 2014 to 2019.
“Justice cannot be based on lies and slander, but on concrete and tangible evidence. Consequently, I am determined to extract myself, whatever the cost, from this black hole into which I have been arbitrarily thrown,” she declared.
The case that led to her imprisonment concerns an alleged falsification of the TDC’s final report. She faces charges of “using her position to gain unfair advantage for herself or a third party”, “fraud” and “forgery” related to the commission report.
According to her lawyers, her detention is solely based on a 2020 complaint accusing her of falsifying the report.
A former member of the TDC claims that Bensedrine added to the final report a recommendation for a three-billion-dinar (around $930m) compensation to the Banque Franco-Tunisienne (BFT). In this case, the Tunisian state is accused of having expropriated the investment of the BFT’s majority shareholder, ABCI Investments Limited, in the 1980s.
Created by a 2013 law on transitional justice, the Truth and Dignity Commission is an independent, state-funded body responsible for revealing human rights violations committed between 1955 and 2013.
The period corresponds to the country’s independence from France’s colonial rule until the first years of the post-2011 revolution era, including the long autocratic reigns of Habib Bourguiba and Ben Ali.
Three years after the outbreak of the popular protests that toppled Ben Ali and ignited the so-called Arab Spring, Bensedrine dreamed of following the South African post-apartheid model. In 2016, her truth commission organised public hearings of victims of state abuses that left their mark on Tunisians.
But she faced much criticism regarding her management of the TDC. Bensedrine was accused of making decisions alone, harassing two members and mismanaging funds. In response, she said in 2017 the attacks on her were orchestrated by a “media cabal”.
Published in 2019, the more-than-2,000-page report containing recommendations to avoid falling back into dictatorship has since been forgotten.
The proposals for reforms were not followed up, the reparations fund for victims was not established, while the 13 specialised chambers to judge the 174 gravest cases are at a standstill.
They incriminate some 1,500 people – many of them civil servants still in office – for mainly “serious violations of human rights” according to the 2013 law, such as voluntary homicide, sexual violence, torture, forced disappearance and death sentence without a fair trial.
The TDC also exposed and documented economic crimes and corruption, sparking resistance in some business and political circles.
In March 2022, President Kais Saied, anxious to fill the state coffers, launched a criminal reconciliation project with businessmen accused of corruption under Ben Ali, effectively stopping the economic arbitrations already reached by the TDC.
‘Lies and slander’
Last May, the activist, who had already been imprisoned under Bourguiba and Ben Ali, sent a letter to journalists, a copy of which was received by MEE.
“The TDC is on trial today because it has initiated a process of accountability against the political police machine that is corrupting the security forces and using them to serve private agendas that have nothing to do with maintaining order and public safety,” she wrote.
‘The Commission is on trial today because it has initiated a process of accountability against the political police machine that is corrupting the security forces and using them to serve private agendas’
– Sihem Bensedrine
“[The TDC] is not forgiven for having indicted 1,426 people before the specialised transitional justice chambers for having committed crimes against citizens by abusing the public force, including 66 people for financial corruption,” she added.
The trials in the specialised chambers began in the spring of 2018. To date, no verdict has been rendered. For Bensedrine and her supporters, this is concrete proof of the authorities’ unwillingness to advance transitional justice.
“The TDC is also on trial for having exposed the system of corruption that the police machine protects, and for having proposed reforms that protect the state from this gangrene that is monopolising public resources and impoverishing society,” Bensedrine stated in the letter.
“It is the impunity they have enjoyed that has allowed the crimes of torture and homicide as well as police abuse to continue and have resumed even more today,” she concluded.
A few days earlier, Bensedrine had participated in a rally organised by lawyers to protest the violent arrest, on 13 May 2024, of their colleague Mehdi Zagrouba, who was allegedly tortured.
Political prisoners
As soon as Bensedrine was detained, UN experts spoke of “judicial harassment” for her role as president of the Truth and Dignity Commission.
“It appears to be an attempt to discredit crucial information in the Commission’s report, which could lead to legal actions against those involved in corruption during previous regimes,” the experts said.
For one of her lawyers, Ayachi Hammami, Bensedrine is a “political prisoner”.
“It is the people who are singled out in the TDC report who are pursuing her today,” he told MEE, referring to officials prosecuted before the specialised chambers.
On 17 January, Human Rights Watch called again for Bensedrine’s release.
“Bensedrine has fought the abuses of successive governments for four decades and was imprisoned under former presidents Habib Bourguiba and Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. Now she is detained under Tunisia’s authoritarian president, Kais Saied, in a clear case of retaliation for her human rights work,” said Bassam Khawaja, HRW deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Elected for a first term in 2019 and re-elected last October in a controversial vote, Saied granted himself full powers on 25 July 2021 after freezing – and later dissolving – parliament. He extended his control over the judiciary and intensified the repression of his opponents.
Since what critics have dubbed Saied’s “constitutional coup”, many political figures, activists, lawyers and journalists have been imprisoned. HRW estimates them at “over 80 people” in its latest tally.
‘What Sihem did within the TDC will remain set in stone. She participated in the building of a milestone in the fight for a modern and fair state’
– Omar Mestiri, Bensedrine’s husband
In March 2023, Bensedrine wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian that “in 18 months, President Saied has torched every liberal institution Tunisians has painstakingly built.”
Nevertheless, the former head of the Truth and Dignity Commission keeps going.
“She draws her strength from the feeling of duty accomplished despite the hostility. She feels she’s been held hostage by those who want to bury transitional justice,” Omar Mestiri, her husband, told MEE.
The latter, who is also a journalist, remains hopeful.
“What Sihem did within the TDC will remain set in stone. She participated in the building of a milestone in the fight for a modern and fair state. One day, this process will be relaunched.”
On 24 January, the judge will decide whether to extend Bensedrine’s pretrial detention, supposed to end next Monday, or release her. A sit-in was held in Tunis on Wednesday morning in support of the former TCD leader.