A Tunisian court has toughened on appeal to fifteen months in prison a conviction for glorifying terrorism handed down against Rached Ghannouchi, imprisoned leader of the Ennahda party and main opponent of Tunisian President, Kaïs Saïed, announced his Islamo-conservative movement Tuesday October 31st. Rached Ghannouchi, in detention since April in another case, was sentenced in May 2023 to a year in prison and a fine of around 300 euros, confirmed on appeal.
The 82-year-old leader was convicted under a complaint from a police union denouncing comments he made in early 2022 at the funeral of an Ennahda official to whom he had assured that he “did not fear the powerful or the tyrants”, this word referring to the police, according to the indictment.
“These accusations are false and devoid of any legal basis,” Ennahda said in a statement, saying that the word “tyrant” had been “taken out of context.” The appeal judgment “illustrates once again the subordination of part of the judicial power to the executive power and its desire to harass its political opponents,” Ennahda added.
Around twenty opponents imprisoned
Rached Ghannouchi is the most important figure in the opposition to Kaïs Saïed since the latter, democratically elected in 2019, seized full powers in a coup on July 25, 2021 and then had the Constitution revised to establish an ultra-presidential regime. Leader of a party that has dominated political life for the last decade, he has been questioned in several investigations, in particular on the “sending of jihadists” to Syria and Iraq and suspicions of “money laundering dirty “.
Mr. Ghannouchi has been imprisoned since April 17 after speaking in public of a risk of “civil war” in Tunisia if left-wing parties or those stemming from political Islam such as Ennahda were eliminated there. Since February, more than twenty opponents, businessmen and other personalities, described as “terrorists” by Mr. Saïed, have been imprisoned on charges of “plot against internal security”.
The latest arrest, on October 5, was that of opposition leader Abir Moussi, head of the Free Destourian Party, a movement nostalgic for the dictatorships of independence hero Habib Bourguiba and his overthrown successor Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011 during the revolution that marked the start of the “Arab Spring.”
