Environment
The Republic of Tunisia borders Algeria and Libya, and has a 1,300 kilometre Mediterranean coastline.
While the bulk of its investment and infrastructure have been concentrated in the country’s capital and coastal regions, other areas – in particular, the south and west of Tunisia – have seen little development and experience some of the highest poverty rates. 70 per cent of those living in extreme poverty live in the North West, Central West and South West regions, despite constituting only 30 per cent of the overall population.
History
Amazigh are indigenous to the area of today’s Tunisia, as well as to other neighbouring countries comprising the region referred to by Amazigh as Tamazgha. Phoenicians settled on the Mediterranean coast in the 10th century BCE, later founding the city and empire of Carthage before the area fell to Roman rule. Arabs conquered the region in the seventh century, introducing Islam. Arab rule sparked Amazigh rebellions and periods of Amazigh rule. The fifteenth century saw significant migration of Jews to Tunisia. The Tunisian Jewish community was one of the oldest and most important in North Africa. In Muslim countries around the tenth century, they were regarded as ‘People of the Book’ (ahl al-Kitab) and thus deserving protection. In general, Jews were not forced to convert, although they suffered a host of restrictions. How seriously these rules were applied depended on local conditions.
Confronted by such adversity, Jewish communities were held together by the solidarity of the local group which revolved around a synagogue and by treatment received from the higher authorities. Jews continued to be present in the cities as merchants and artisans.
Tunisia became part of the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century, and in 1881, France surmounted Italian interest and established a protectorate. As in other French colonies, Jews fared well, but during the brief German occupation of Tunisia in World War II, many were imprisoned in forced labour camps.
Tunisia gained independence in 1956, after two years of struggle by Tunisian resistance against the French colonial authorities, and the monarchy was abolished the following year. Tunisia’s Jewish population dwindled steadily from over 1,000,000 in 1948 to 20,000 after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, eventually falling to just 1,500 to 2,000 today. Tunisia’s post-colonial politics, beginning with President Habib Bourguiba’s authoritarian rule from independence (1956) until 1987, largely marginalized the role of those groups who fall outside the narrowly defined Arab and Sunni Muslim identity promoted by the state.
This policy was largely continued from 1987 until 2011, when Tunisia was ruled by an authoritarian President, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who came to power in a bloodless coup after having Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first president, declared mentally unfit to hold office. Ben Ali followed his predecessor’s focus on economic modernization without regard to political plurality or human rights, with the exception of advances in women’s rights.
The Ben Ali regime took a tough line from 1994 against the party Ennahda, the country’s main Islamist movement, which was driven underground. President Ben Ali used the Islamist threat to stifle other opposition. With a weak and divided legal opposition, and the gap between rich and poor smaller than in any other Arab African country, Tunisia long remained largely depoliticized. The broadly secularist, pro-Western, yet authoritarian government considered the pursuit of economic growth paramount, and it feared that tourism and its strategy of investment-led growth could collapse if the country’s Islamic opposition were allowed to become militant. Critics said the security clampdown, including widespread detentions, went well beyond what was needed to counter the Islamist threat.
In January 2011, after 23 years under Ben Ali’s authoritarian rule, the Tunisian people joined together in an uprising that ultimately brought his regime to an end. The Tunisian revolution, –known in Western media as the ‘Jasmine Revolution’, or the ‘social media revolution’, terms usually rejected by Tunisian civil society which prefers referring to the ‘Dignity Revolution’ – is widely recognized as the first chapter of the Arab Spring, inspiring a wave of uprisings in its wake across the Middle East and North Africa.
The demonstrations in Tunisia began with the desperate and symbolic gesture of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who, on 17 December 2010, set himself on fire in front of the provincial governor’s headquarters in Sidi Bouzid, one of Tunisia’s most economically depressed regions, in protest against police harassment. On the same day, angry citizens had filled the streets in Sidi Bouzid and soon protests spread to other cities until they reached the capital, Tunis, forcing Ben Ali to flee to Saudi Arabia on 14 January 2011.
Since the overthrow in January 2011 of Ben Ali, Tunisia has successfully established a functioning democracy and taken a number of positive steps to promote human rights in the country, including the drafting of the progressive 2014 Constitution. This has been followed by a number of other legislative changes that have benefitted its minorities, including the passage in October 2018 of a law criminalizing racial discrimination.
Governance
Since the outbreak of the 2010/11 Jasmine Revolution and the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his authoritarian regime after more than two decades of political repression, Tunisia has made remarkable progress in its transition to a functioning democracy. By 2015, only four years after the uprising, Tunisia had already passed a new Constitution and held fair parliamentary elections. A coalition government was formed the same year as a result of the negotiations between the secularist Nidaa Tounes party and the Islamist Ennahda: the latter subsequently dropped its Islamist label in May 2016 to redefine itself as a party of Muslim democrats.
The governmental coalition between the secularist and the Islamist parties ruled the country through consensus until the 2019 elections. During this time, the government’s focus was mainly on economic growth, and only limited attention was given to human rights and minority rights issues. The most significant opportunity for the country’s long-lasting human rights development was the creation by the late President Beji Caied Essebsi of a presidential commission ‘COLIBE’ (a French acronym meaning the Individual Freedoms and Equality Committee) comprised of legal experts charged to reform the legal arsenal in conformity with the 2014 Constitution and international human rights standards. This Commission’s work was concluded by the elaboration of a report that recommended for instance the decriminalization of homosexuality and the equality between men and women in inheritance rights. This report divided the Tunisian public opinion between its advocates and those who protested against it.
The debate over human rights and individual freedoms in Tunisia has arisen again during the 2019 presidential elections, where candidates were asked about their positions regarding the rights of several groups. In this regard, the winner of the 2019 elections – the current President Kais Saied, said that he is against the abrogation of the law criminalizing same-sex relationships (Article 230 of the Penal Code) as well as equality in inheritance rights.
These debates were overshadowed by the fragile social and economic situation in Tunisia (further weakened by the Covid-19 outbreak) along with the political crisis. As a result, many protests took place during the first quarter of 2021 calling for the resignation of the prime minister and the commitment to political and economic reforms. These protests were violently stopped by the authorities and several activists were arrested. A further series of protests occurred on 25 July 2021, which led the President to take exceptional measures by dismissing the Prime Minister and suspending the activities of the parliament led by Ennahdha party. At the moment of writing, the exceptional measures had been extended until further notice.
Many reasons have been put forward to explain why Tunisia was the most – if not the only – successful Arab Spring country. For some, this was due to the exceptionality Tunisia already enjoyed in terms of women’s rights, modern education and religious moderation, as well as its relatively homogenous population and the non-existence of sectarian tensions. Other factors include the important role of spontaneous youth movements and social media. The Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT) is also credited with playing a major role in the country’s politics, first in guiding the country’s independence movement and subsequently supporting civil society during the revolution and its aftermath. The contribution of other significant players at key moments, such as the legal profession and the army, has also been acknowledged.
Nevertheless, under Ben Ali Tunisia also suffered many of the same issues – the repression of civil and political freedoms, regular human rights violations, arbitrary detention, imprisonment without trial, torture, harassment of political opponents and state corruption – that plagued other countries in the region on the eve of the Arab Spring. Some of these issues have since been positively addressed. For example, freedom of expression and assembly is now almost absolute: this is reflected in the proliferation of civil society organizations (CSOs), as well as the new 2014 Constitution which is grounded in civil law and guarantees the basic rights of all citizens.
However, though Tunisia is indeed recognized as a secular state, shari’a law still influences certain laws and practices. Furthermore, despite a series of reforms to strengthen individual rights – for example, an amendment of the code of criminal procedures was introduced in 2016 giving detainees the right to a lawyer in pre-charge detention, so reducing the threat of torture and forced confessions – authorities can still engage in arbitrary and discriminatory practices. This is evident in the severe human rights abuses that LGBTQI+ groups still experience including forced anal examinations, despite the guarantees of individual freedom and integrity in Articles 23 and 24 of the new Constitution. This is in part the result of the continued existence of Article 230 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes homosexuality with a jail sentence of up to three years; as in other areas, recent legislative advances are at times contradicted by older legislation that has yet to be amended.
In a number of other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, conversion from Islam to another religion is regarded as apostasy and can carry heavy penalties, including death, for those who choose to practice another faith. In Tunisia, the 2014 Constitution does not include any prohibitions on conversion and even goes so far, in Article 6, to actively prohibit attacks on converts. Nevertheless, it remains the case that those who choose to renounce Islam, whether to convert to another faith or out of atheist conviction, can face significant social pressure. This is especially the case if they publicize their beliefs to others. In a number of cases, articles from the Penal Code on public order and public decency have been invoked to penalize Tunisians who have chosen to convert to Christianity or identify as atheist.
Until today, the Constitutional Court that should be responsible, among other matters, for looking into the existing discrepancies between the 2014 constitutional guarantees and some prior laws, has not yet been elected.