There are stories that, on their own, reveal the workings of a system. The story of Adem Rezgui, a young Tunisian aged 21, sentenced to 30 years in prison in place of his deceased brother, is an allegory of the judicial shipwreck that Tunisia is currently experiencing. An unjust, absurd and cruel case - but far from isolated.
The facts date back to 2022. His brother, Mohamed, was charged with assaulting someone. Wanted by the law, he managed to leave the country. Adem was then taken hostage - there's no other word for it - to force Mohamed to surrender. In his place, he was sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment.
Mohamed died in Germany, where he had taken refuge. His body was repatriated to Tunisia and his identity formally confirmed by the authorities. Yet Adem remains behind bars. Not because he is guilty, but because releasing an innocent man would be tantamount to acknowledging an extremely serious fault. Instead of making reparation, the state falsifies the facts: it modifies the charges to keep a man in detention, even though his innocence has been established.
This chilling logic echoes another, more high-profile case: the so-called "conspiracy against state security" trial. Here too, citizens are detained without evidence, on the basis of anonymous testimony, without confrontation, sometimes even judged from a distance, in trials whose verdicts seem written in advance. Here again, it's not the facts that count, but the political will to punish, intimidate and neutralize. Justice becomes an instrument of power, a stage on which the stifling of all dissent and dissenting voices is relentlessly re-enacted.
In Adem's case, as in that of the "conspiracy", what is at stake is the complete perversion of the idea of justice. A system where acknowledging an error is perceived as a threat, where the truth becomes a burden to be concealed, where innocence itself becomes suspect.
Today, Adem is the hostage of a state that sacrifices its citizens to preserve its facade of infallibility. Like the "conspiracy" detainees, he embodies a truth that the regime wants to suppress. Because admitting to wrongful imprisonment paves the way for the collapse of all legitimacy, if there is any left.
The moral is brutal: in Kaïs Saïed's Tunisia, the law no longer protects, it crushes. It is no longer justice that guides state action, but the fear of losing control - even at the cost of human dignity. Adem is not an isolated case: he is the mirror of what Tunisia is becoming, a country where those in power manufacture the guilty and destroy the innocent so as not to have to face themselves.
