If incarceration in prison is inescapable when it corroborates, at least superficially, Kais Saied's presidential narrative and his alleged merciless war on corruption, getting out is another matter.

Legal and judicial logic demands that detention should be the exception, based on factual and moral elements proportionate to the accusation and the offence attributed to the person concerned. This logic has now been totally swept aside by a Tunisian justice system under the yoke of Kais Saied and his Minister of Justice: a simple instruction from on high is all it takes for a detention warrant to be hastily issued by the first investigating judge to hear the case. As for the investigation or inquiry - which is supposed to be carried out with both the prosecution and the defence in mind - it can drag on without justification, as long as the political objective is achieved: to put an opponent behind bars.

Mr. Samir Taieb, former Minister of Agriculture and academic, had become an ideal target for the Kais Saied regime. A committal order was issued against him in November 2024, before he had even been interviewed, and since then he has been waiting for a forensic report slower than Noah's crow. This expert report clearly confirms that the examining magistrate has no serious evidence of guilt, but that doesn't matter: the regime's propaganda imperatives clearly take precedence over the application of the law.

On the substance of the case, Mr. Taieb is accused of having ratified a decision by the board of the OTD (Office des Terres Domaniales) concerning the postponement of debt collection for farmers - a routine administrative procedure, especially as the Minister is a supervisory authority and is not competent to take the decision that the Office has regularly taken according to the vagaries of the seasons. Among the alleged beneficiaries of the OTD's decision is businessman Abdelaziz Makhloufi, also detained in the same case and provisionally released in a sudden and suspicious manner. It's obvious that the latter has a right to freedom in a case as absurd and fictitious as this one, but it's almost obvious that he was the victim of blackmail, since his request had been refused a few days before the shady intervention of certain members of Kais Saied's family (reminiscent of the actions of Ben Ali's Trabelssia family). This provisional release was obtained against the payment of an astrological amount as a deposit, and of course this was only the tip of the iceberg.

If the conditions for Mr. Makhloufi's provisional release - and rightly so - are established, they would a priori be for Mr. Samir Taieb and many other detainees in the case, whose involvement is secondary and whose alleged offences remain, even to this day, unproven.

The examining magistrate Anis Maraoui, who is unfortunately only a spokesman for the regime, disagrees: even if the alleged main suspect has been provisionally released, the suspect for indirect acts is not eligible for this freedom, even though his alleged guilt has not yet been proven by an expert report which apparently will not be completed in the near future.

Clearly, this is not a simple bail, but a real ransom - a sum that Mr. Taieb has neither the means to pay, nor the possibility of assuming, unlike the "deal" demanded and paid to the gang.

The CRLDHT :

• Is outraged by the arbitrary detention of Mr. Samir Taieb and the other detainees in this case, imprisoned solely because they do not have the means to pay the ransom demanded.
• Condemns a justice system with variable geometry and multiple truths, and magistrates who have been brought to heel, transformed into veritable privateers of power.
• Calls for the immediate release of Mr. Samir Taieb and the other detainees in the case, and for their rights to a fair trial to be respected.
• Considers that such aberrations do nothing to solve the deep-seated, structural problems of corruption in Tunisia; on the contrary, they only serve to entrench them further.