Tunisians rally in Tunis on April 9, 2013 to demand justice for victims of the 2011 revolution. Image by Magharebia. Source: Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

This post by Sanaa Mhaimdi, was first published in Arabic by Raseef 22* on February 8, 2025. This edited version was translated into English and published on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement. 

When former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown after a popular revolution that toppled his regime in 2011, Tunisians believed that, with his fall, the dark side of the former regime and its heavy legacy of human rights violations would finally be revealed.

However, after years of searching for justice for the victims of torture in the country, a group of Tunisians turned to the United Nations and filed a complaint with the Committee Against Torture (CAT) against the state, as a “last hope” to achieve justice and hold their torturers accountable.

The complaint was submitted with the support of the World Organization against Torture (OMCT), citing “the Tunisian state’s inability to fulfill its obligations to investigate perpetrators of torture and ill-treatment, prosecute them, and compensate victims.”

Victims of torture

Rached Jaidane, a former political prisoner under Ben Ali, is one of the six who filed the complaint. In 1993, he was sentenced to 26 years in prison and 5 years of house arrest. He was released after 13 years during which he was subjected to all kinds of torture.

“I only expect Tunisia to acknowledge its dark history,” he told Raseef22, explaining that suing the Tunisian state before the UN is the “last resort” for accountability, after the judicial process failed to achieve any progress in this file.

Jaidan stressed that “the transitional justice project has been permanently buried in Tunisia,” and that the main goal of this complaint is for the state to acknowledge this “injustice,” to break with the policy of impunity, stressing that “this battle is for future generations, and the violations of the past must not be repeated.”

Reda Barakati, brother of Nabil Barakati, who died under torture in a security center in the Siliana Governorate (northwestern Tunisia) in 1987, said that his brother’s case has been followed up by the judicial circuits specialized in transitional justice since 2018, and after holding 22 judicial sessions, no ruling has been issued.

Barakati added that the international treaties and agreements signed by the Tunisian state allow it to be prosecuted before international judicial institutions for failing to achieve justice to the victims of torture in the country.

Failure of the judicial path

Ines Lamloum, legal advisor to the OMCT, explained to Raseef22 that the complaint against the Tunisian state relates to its violation of the right to “redress” for six victims of torture and ill-treatment in the 1980s and 1990s.

“The OMCT represents six plaintiffs, divided into two victims of torture and ill-treatment, activists Rached Jaidan and Mohamed Qusai Jaibi, in addition to the families of four victims who died as a result of torture, namely Faisal Barakat, Rachid Chamakhi, Sahnoon Al-Jawhari and Nabil Barakati,” she explained.

Lamloum pointed out that “since the emergence of the judicial circuits specializing in transitional justice in 2018, no judicial rulings have been issued that do justice to them and their families, which represents a failure of the judicial process.”

She attributes this to “the practice of transferring judges and the incomplete composition of these specialized departments due to judges not receiving special training in transitional justice, in addition to the postponement of court sessions throughout the past years, and the deliberate absence of perpetrators from sessions, which is a blow to the transitional justice process that is primarily based on revealing the truth and accountability.”

The legal advisor explained to Raseef22 that after the complaint is registered by the CAT, it will address the Tunisian government and give it 90 days to submit its observations. If the committee condemns the “Tunisian state” for violating Article 14 of the CAT, the victims will once again resort to the Tunisian judiciary to obtain their rights and redress their harm.

An international embarrassment

Najat Al-Araari, a former member of the Coordination Committee for the Defense of the Transitional Justice Process, explained that “this complaint is an embarrassment for the Tunisian state.” Resorting to the CAT comes after a long litigation process and the continuous postponement of cases.

Al-Araari explained that most countries avoid such complaints because they affect their external image.

She attributes the judicial failure to “the lack of political will and the demonization campaigns that led Tunisian public opinion to believe that the amount of compensation would be a heavy burden on the state, which negatively affected all efforts to provide justice to the victims.”

Al-Araari added that “one of the characteristics of transitional justice is the state’s recognition of the crime, apologizing for it, and then moving on to the reconciliation stage. The goal of transitional justice is reconciliation, not revenge and this begins with the state’s recognition and apology, revealing the truth, questioning and compensating for the harm, and redress to ensure that it is not repeated.”

Frustration and despair

Najat Al-Zamouri, vice president of the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights, told Raseef22 that “the case reflects a state of frustration among torture victims and their families, after years of procrastination and the Tunisian state’s failure to acknowledge past crimes.” However this is not sufficient according to her: “UN mechanisms may guarantee international recognition of these violations and push towards pressuring the state to acknowledge its commitment to combating impunity, but in reality it will not compensate for the need for national accountability to provide justice to victims, because this requires political will to reform the judiciary and end the policy of impunity.”

For her:

the political tensions, the accumulation of economic and political crises in the country, and the exposure of the Tunisian judiciary to political pressures, led to the gradual decline of the transitional justice process over a period of time, in addition to the fact that the return of symbols of the former regime to the political scene in Tunisia prevented the achievement of transitional justice, and thus a historic opportunity was lost to provide justice to the victims of torture during the eras of the Ben Ali and Habib Burguiba regimes.

Hamida Dridi, an expert at the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture, agrees, confirming that “victims of torture during the Ben Ali regime were subjected to shocking and inhumane violations, and despite their long suffering, the Tunisian judiciary did not do them justice. Since 2011, the perpetrators involved in systematic torture cases have not been held accountable or questioned.”

A test for transitional justice

After the 2011 revolution, an independent body, the Truth and Dignity Commission, was established by a special law passed by parliament. Its mission was to document and address human rights violations in Tunisia between 1955 and 2013, when thousands of activists, both leftists and Islamists, were subjected to torture and ill-treatment. The commission published its final report in the Tunisian Official Gazette in 2020.

In August 2024, a judge ordered the precautionary suspension of Sihem Ben Sedrine, who headed the commission between 2014 and 2018 to be investigated on charges of “falsifying” the report, an arrest that was described by Human Rights Watch as retaliatory “against the backdrop of increased repression by President Kais Saied’s government.”