Free expression organisations are concerned that the jailing of eminent lawyer and web author Mohammed Abbou could be part of a wider state strategy to intimidate and marginalise the independent legal community in Tunisia.
Paramilitary police moved into the main Tunis courthouse on 6 May to violently clear lawyers staging a sit-in in protest at Abbou’s three and a half year jail sentence, handed down on 29 April.
Plainclothed and paramilitary police sealed off the area for several hours after the raid as the lawyers met in the offices of the Tunis bar association opposite the court.
Though police have used violence on protesting lawyers before, this was the first time they had invaded a courthouse, an act that further angered the city’s legal community. Many senior Tunisian lawyers suspect that the operation was part of a deliberate strategy to intimidate the independent legal establishment. “I have been a lawyer for many years, and the threats are greater now than ever before”, says lawyer and human rights campaigner Radhia Nasraoui.
The current president of the Tunis bar, Abdelsattar Ben Moussa, says the state uses various means to isolate his membership. These include new rules that allow ordinary law graduates to carry out duties formerly the exclusive responsibility of barristers.
Ben Moussa says pro-government judges are using a 1989 law to strip lawyers of the civil and penal immunity in court — a standard right in other countries’ legal systems. A few days after Abbou’s jailing, a second lawyer, Faouzi Ben Mourad, was jailed for four months for comments made during a routine case that a judge considered critical of the state.
If the lawyers are still not deterred, the authorities turn to violence. Ben Moussa says he was manhandled and threatened when he tried to represent Abbou at his trial — later described by Reporters sans Frontières as a “mockery” that “trampled on the most elementary rules of law”. Nasraoui was recently seriously assaulted and police beat up lawyers outside the Tunis Palace of Justice on 5 April.
One ongoing court case could still rule last year’s elections to the bar council invalid on a technicality on 24 May. It could force a re-vote or allow the justice ministry to make direct appointments. Either step could put pro-government factions in charge. “The overall effect is to marginalise lawyers, lower professional standards and break their independence,” says Ben Moussa.
When approached senior figures in the Tunisian government rejected claims that the Tunis bar is being intimidated by the state. Indeed, one minister accused Radhia Nasraoui of reducing one judge to tears by her “aggressive tone of voice”. He maintains that the dissident lawyers do not follow legal regulations and court procedures.
On 6 May Index on Censorship observed the pressures at first hand as the lawyers took refuge in the offices of the bar association after the assault on the courthouse. Hundreds of riot police, plain-clothed officers, even a pair of old-style “agents provocateurs”, took up positions outside the bar association offices. Police surveillance was high-profile and pervasive. Amnesty International says such surveillance is “manifestly conducted as a form of intimidation” in Tunisia.
This overall strategy deeply concerns The International Freedom of Expression Exchange-Tunisia Monitoring Group (TMG) The TMG is raising their concerns with the European Union, which maintains senior level connections with Tunisia’s Justice Ministry, and the UN human rights rapporteur for the independence of judges and lawyers, Leandro Despouy.
The TMG cites the Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, adopted by the United Nations in Havana, Cuba, in 1990. It believes that Tunisia’s legal system is failing these standards, notably sections governing professional associations of lawyers, governments’ obligation to ensure that lawyers can practise “without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference” and principle 20, which allows lawyers civil and penal immunity for relevant statements made in good faith while at work.
TMG members also say that Tunisian lawyers’ right to freedom of expression, association and assembly are being restricted. The Principles say lawyers “shall have the right to take part in public discussion of matters concerning the law, the administration of justice and the promotion and protection of human rights and to join or form local, national or international organisations and attend their meetings, without suffering professional restrictions by reason of their lawful action or their membership in a lawful organisation”.
The TMG has called upon the international community to persuade the Tunisian government of the importance of an independent professional judiciary and legal community and the need to ensure that its lawyers enjoy the rights established as universal standards by the UN in 1990 in Cuba.
The International Freedom of Expression Exchange – Tunisia Monitoring Group consists of: Article 19, UK; Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE); Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Studies (CEHURDES), Nepal; Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR); Index on Censorship, UK; International Publishers’ Association (IPA), Switzerland; Journalistes en Danger (JED), Democratic Republic of Congo; Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), Namibia; Norwegian PEN; Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN (WiPC), UK; World Association of Newspapers (WAN), France; World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC), USA; World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC)
08.05.2005
