Tunisian anti-terrorist investigators are handling the case of a leading advocate for migrants who has been taken into custody, in what the head of a rights group said was a troubling first for the country.
Abdallah Said, a Tunisian of Chadian origin, was questioned along with the secretary general and treasurer of his association, Enfants de la Lune, said Romdhane Ben Amor, the spokesperson for the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights.
According to La Presse newspaper, which is close to the Tunisian government, Said’s association is suspected of receiving foreign funds “to assist sub-Saharan migrants to enter illegally on to Tunisian soil”. Tunisia is one of the main launching points for boats carrying people trying to cross the Mediterranean to seek better lives in Europe.
In May the Tunisian president, Kais Saied, lashed out at organisations that defended the rights of migrants, calling their leaders “traitors and mercenaries”. Saied, who has overseen a sweeping crackdown on undocumented black people living in Tunisia, won a second term as president last month in a vote with turnout of just 28.8%.
Tunisia has received large funds from the EU in exchange for help with curbing small boat crossings to Europe, under an agreement signed last year.
Ben Amor said this was the first time authorities had used anti-terrorist investigators against associations specialising in migration issues. The arrest was “a dangerous signal” and part of “a new wave of even tougher repression” against migration activists after a crackdown in May, he said.
In 2023, the Guardian revealed how thousands of people from sub-Saharan Africa had been forcibly returned by Tunisian officers to remote desert regions where some died of thirst. Last month a Guardian investigation revealed abuses by EU-funded security forces in Tunisia, including allegations that members of the Tunisian national guard were raping migrant women and beating children.
In a note released over the weekend, the Committee for the Respect of Liberties and Human Rights in Tunisia said: “Abdallah Said is incarcerated as part of a policy of criminalising solidarity with migrants, which has resulted in numerous arrests and ongoing prosecutions in cases for which no hearings have yet been scheduled.”
On Friday, Victor Dupont, a 27-year-old PhD student at Aix-Marseille University’s Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Islamic World,returned to Paris after almost one month of detention in Tunisia.
Dupont researched social movements, youth unemployment and Tunisia’s 2011 revolution. His case had been compared to that of Giulio Regeni, the University of Cambridge PhD student whose tortured body was found dumped after he went missing in Cairo in 2016.
Dupont’s arrest provoked concerns about the safety and security of foreign researchers in Tunisia, where Saied has reversed many of the democratic gains made since the country’s longtime dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was toppled in 2011 during the regional uprisings known as the Arab spring.
“Our fear was that after the presidential election on October 6 the repression of any voice and form of dissent would only increase,” a European PhD student based in Tunisia said. “The arrests of Dupont and Said confirm that the authorities are willing to gamble with both diplomatic relations and relations with marginalised citizens to crack down on freedom of speech, academic freedom, and solidarity with refugees,” added the student, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.
Agence France-Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report
