Tunisian presidential candidate Ayachi Zammel has been sentenced to six months in prison for falsifying documents, the second prison sentence against him in a week, days before the country’s presidential election.
Tunisia’s TAP news agency reported on Wednesday that the Criminal Chamber of the Jendouba Court of First Instance sentenced Zammel to six months in prison for “deliberately using a fraudulent certificate”. Last week, Zammel was sentenced to 20 months in prison last week on charges of falsifying popular endorsements.
“It is another unjust ruling and a farce that clearly aims to weaken him in the election race, but we will defend his right to the last minute,” Zammel’s lawyer Abdessattar Massoudi told the news agency Reuters.
The ruling underscores mounting tensions before the vote, with opposition and civil society groups voicing concerns about a potentially rigged election designed to keep President Kais Saied in power.
Zammel, a businessman who was little-known to the general public before his presidential bid, was arrested on September 2 on suspicion of falsifying the signatures he gathered to file the candidacy papers needed to run for president.
He was released on September 6, but was almost immediately arrested again on similar accusations.
The head of Tunisia’s Azimoun party is one of only three approved candidates, running against incumbent Saied and Zouhair Magzhaoui, a former Saied supporter whose pan-Arabist party Echaab party was previously close to the president.
Political tensions in Tunisia have escalated in the run-up to the October 6 election, particularly after an electoral commission, appointed by Saied, disqualified three prominent candidates earlier this month, prompting protests from opposition groups and civil society.
After a court required Tunisia’s election authority to reinstate the three candidates, one of them — Abdellatif El Mekki — was arrested on charges that stemmed from a 2014 murder investigation that critics have called politically motivated.
Saied, who is seeking a second term, won power in a 2019 election. But he later orchestrated a sweeping power grab in 2021, shutting down Parliament and ruling by decree. Opposition figures were also jailed.
Saied’s two most prominent critics, the right-wing Free Destourian Party’s Abir Moussi and the Islamist party Ennahdha’s Rached Ghannouchi, have also been in prison since last year.
Civil liberty advocates have decried the crackdown as a symptom of Tunisia’s democratic backslide. Amnesty International this week called it “a clear pre-election assault on the pillars of human rights and the rule of law”.
