Human rights in Tunisia

The issue of Human rights in Tunisia, is complex, contradictory, and, in some regards, confusing in the wake of a revolution that began in January 2011 and overthrew the longstanding dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. While the immediate months after the revolution were characterized by significant improvements in the status of human rights, some of those advances have since been reversed. The entire situation, however, remains in a state of considerable flux, with different observers sometimes providing virtually irreconcilable accounts of the current status of human rights in that country.

For most of the time since Freedom House began issuing its Freedom in the World ratings, Tunisia ranked near the bottom of the ratings; it consistently garnered "Not Free" rankings in all but a few years. Tunisia was upgraded to “Partly Free” after the revolution, its political rights rating improving from 7 to 3 (with 7 the worst and 1 the best) and its civil liberties rating going from 5 to 4. As of 2016, Tunisia has been upgraded to "Free"—the only Arab country to garner this rating.

A U.S. State Department report, issued in April 2011, depicts the status of human rights in that country on the eve of the revolution, citing “restrictions on freedom of speech, press and association,” the “severe” intimidation of journalists, reprisals against critical of the government, questionable conduct of elections, and reports of arbitrary arrest, widespread corruption, official extortion, government influence over the judiciary, extremely poor prison conditions, and the abuse and torture of detainees and prisoners, involving a wide range of torture methods. Defendants did not enjoy the right to a speedy trial, and access to evidence was often restricted; in cases involving family and inheritance law, judges often ignored civil law and applied sharia instead.

Although the principal cause of the revolt was a frustration over the country's dire economic situation, many leaders of the revolution were longtime human-rights activists and many participants shared their hope of replacing autocracy with a democratic government and a civil society in which human rights were respected. As Christopher de Bellaigue noted in an article posted at the New York Review of Books website on December 18, 2012, Tunisia's new constitution is, “give or take a few vague references to Islam, strikingly secular. (It does not mention the Sharia, for instance, and guarantees equal rights for all Tunisian men and women.)”

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