Tunisian women are suffering unprecedented repression at the hands of the current regime, with hate campaigns on social networks followed by harsh arrests, arbitrary detentions and forced exile. They are magistrates, lawyers, rights defenders, opponents of the current regime or journalists. Their names are Cheima, Bochra, Sihem, Sonia,....
Serious accusations based on the anti-terrorism and anti-money-laundering laws, which carry penalties of up to death, and/or Decree-Law 54 on false information and rumors (5 to 10 years' imprisonment), but fallacious and without any proof whatsoever.
Many of them have been detained without trial, preventive detention having become the principle and freedom the exception. Among those accused of money laundering - leaders of migrant or refugee aid associations who have been held in pre-trial detention for almost a year - the investigating judge's decision to dismiss the case has been reclassified as a different crime on appeal. In this way, their detention can be extended, on the basis of new charges, according to a system known as rotation or recycling.
In the first decision handed down for plotting against state security under the anti-terrorism law (Instalingo case), several women, including journalists, were sentenced to between 27 and 5 years in prison.
Trials are neither fair nor equitable: investigations are carried out solely by the prosecution, without confrontation, and the only evidence is anonymous and fanciful testimony whose alleged facts are not verified. Decisions are often rendered without respect for the rights of the defense, or in defiance of a defense that proves the absence of false information, terrorism or money laundering. Lawyers for detainees in the so-called "plot against state security" case, whose first hearing took place on March 4, are being prosecuted for publicly debunking the false accusations against their clients.
Victims of a criminal justice system that takes its orders from the executive, the inmates live in inhuman conditions of detention, in overcrowded cells, under neon lights that are never turned off, day or night. Their families and those who have been released speak of real torture, if not physical torture due to the deplorable conditions of detention, then at least moral torture. Parked in high-security wards, many of them are treated like terrorists and denied the meagre rights enjoyed by ordinary prisoners. The health of all of them has suffered, particularly following the hunger strikes they have undertaken to protest against injustice.
When Sihem Ben Sedrine (former president of the Truth and Dignity Commission) went on hunger strike, she wrote: "I will not stand for any more injustice. Justice cannot be based on lies and slander, but on concrete, tangible evidence. As a result, I am determined to extricate myself, whatever the cost, from this black hole into which I have been arbitrarily thrown ".
Prison care is provided only after the disease has taken hold. And tasteless, cold food, including that which families bring to the inmates, due to the many restrictions placed on the basket. Most of the visits (behind glass, once a week) and the twice-weekly preparation of the food basket are carried out by the families, whose food is not always given to the inmates as a sign of reprisal.
A double punishment for women who are either detained themselves or have their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers or husbands politically detained, under the yoke of dictatorship and patriarchal domination, which feed off each other.
United in a league of families of political prisoners, they regularly denounce the emptiness of the charges brought against their loved ones, the insalubrity of the prisons, the multiple attacks on their dignity and the deterioration in their state of health. One of them speaks of "methodical, slow, calculated destruction", "a desire to destroy physically" and "to break morally".
The others live in the loneliness and bitterness of forced exile.
It's no longer just free, critical or dissident voices that are being silenced, or public space that is being confiscated from women, but a veritable physical liquidation of women, through their confinement, their exhaustion in prison visiting rooms or their "banishment" from national territory.
Not seen since Tunisia's independence.
