Introduction
At the initiative of the Comité pour le respect des libertés et des droits de l'Homme en Tunisie (CRLDHT), a meeting of rare political and intellectual intensity was held on May 15, 2025 at the CICP in Paris, focusing on the impacts of the externalization of European Union migration policies in Tunisia. Entitled "Politiques migratoires de l'UE : quels impacts en Tunisie?" (EU migration policies: what impact in Tunisia?), the round table took place a year after a wave of repression hit those involved in defending the rights of exiles. Activists, researchers, parliamentarians, members of NGOs and relatives of political prisoners reaffirmed the need to deconstruct security rhetoric and lay bare the logic of European cooperation which, under the guise of flow management, fuels repression and the delegitimization of solidarity.
Security cooperation in defiance of fundamental rights
Laying the groundwork for a rigorous analysis, Ysé El Bouhali Bouchet's introductory speech examined the political economy of outsourcing. According to CCFD Terre Solidaire, Tunisia is one of France's five priority countries for "migration cooperation". Between 2015 and 2024, the European Union injected more than 200 million euros into the country, most of it devoted to border management. In 2023, a new Franco-Tunisian agreement, with no conditionality on human rights, has earmarked a further 26 million euros for law enforcement training, the purchase of surveillance equipment and the fight against so-called "irregular" immigration.
Despite repeated requests, the French Ministry of the Interior refused all access to budgetary information, forcing the organizations to take legal action. This indiscriminate cooperation resulted in practices on the ground that seriously undermined human rights: illegal refoulements at the Libyan and Algerian borders, destitute migrants abandoned in the desert, and suspicions of human trafficking involving state agents.
An ideological rationale: the analysis of European closure
On another level, the denunciation of the ideological framework of this policy was at the heart of a structural critique: outsourcing is not simply a technical management of mobility, but a political project built around fear, race and control. The European Pact on Migration, adopted in 2024 despite the warnings of over 160 NGOs, is the matrix of this logic.
The 2023 EU-Tunisia agreement, worth 105 million euros, was signed in an authoritarian climate, illustrated by Kaïs Saïd's racist remarks in February of the same year. Frontex plays a central role in this configuration, as a technocratic tool of Fortress Europe. Its responsibility for refoulements at sea, its complicity in violent interceptions, and its structural opacity make it an institution that Danièle Obono, MP for La France Insoumise, is calling for to be dismantled without delay.
The abandoned sea: shipwrecks and obstacles to rescue
Shifting the focus to the maritime consequences of these choices, the discussion turned to the concrete effects of states abandoning their rescue missions. Since 2015, NGOs such as Sea-Watch have taken over some of the responsibilities once assumed by Italy via the Mare Nostrum program.
The delegation of SAR zones to Libya (2018) and Tunisia (2023) allows European states to evade their obligations. In September 2024, 21 people disappeared in a zone under Maltese responsibility, due to a lack of intervention. This passivity is accompanied by legislative measures: the Piantedosi and Flussi laws, adopted in Italy in 2023 and 2024, impose distant ports of arrival and multiply the administrative obstacles to NGO action, as detailed by Bérénice Gaudin, advocacy officer at Sea-Watch.
Mass expulsions and administered death
On the subject of forced movement, the focus was on expulsions of Tunisian nationals. The tightening of European policies meant that in 2024, over 1,200 expulsions were carried out to Tabarka airport, which has been declared an exception zone.
The methods employed in this process amount to institutional violence: detentions without trial, forced sedation, abuse. The silence surrounding Louay Ben Abdelatif's death in an Italian center is symptomatic of a dehumanizing system. What's more, the judicialization of acts of solidarity in Tunisia places the burden of externally-imposed control squarely on the shoulders of citizens. This is what former Tunisian MP Majdi Karbai has vigorously denounced.
The Sherifa Riahi case: the face of targeted repression
Sherifa Riahi's case is emblematic of the level of injustice reached in the criminalization of humanitarian commitments. A former director of Tunisie Terre d'Asile, Sherifa was arrested in May 2024 for acts that she could not have committed as a person in charge, as she no longer held any position at the time.
His detention, the restrictions on visits to his family, including his infant son, and the use of the anti-terrorism law for blatantly political ends, point to a repressive strategy aimed at discouraging any solidarity activism. This case, far from being isolated, is part of a systematic policy of dissuasion. The poignant testimony of Zeineb, her cousin, reminded us that Sherifa is just one of the many faces of this targeted repression.
Towards a sovereignty of rights and solidarity
This moment of shared reflection opened up a space of analysis where an articulated critique of a European migratory system that has become, under the guise of managerial rationality, a permanent regime of exception. Borders are no longer simply geographical: they cross bodies, discourses and laws, assigning, excluding and disqualifying. In this context, the outsourcing of migratory competences to authoritarian states constitutes much more than a renunciation of Europe's moral sovereignty: it is its active abjuration. Migration, and those who support it, are reduced to silence, dehumanization and invisibilization. But this meeting also revealed the political power of solidarity: the power which, even when hindered, persists in naming the unjustifiable, in denouncing complicity, and in demanding, against all odds, effective equal rights.
