An adviser to Rached Ghannouchi, the President of the Ennahda Movement, has accused the Tunisian authorities of attempting to “put the democratic transition on trial” by targeting its most prominent figures. This is a reference to the trial of the movement’s vice president and former Prime Minister Ali Laarayedh in what is known as the “deportation to hotbeds of tension and terrorism” case. Ghannouchi himself is already imprisoned in Tunisia.
“The authorities are trying to put the democratic transition on trial by criminalising its figures, such as the situation in the deportation case in which former Prime Minister Ali Laarayedh is being tried,” Riadh Chaibi told Al-Quds Al-Arabi.
“There are no guarantees of judicial independence or fair trial conditions. Rather, the verdicts are politicised and determined according to the will of the political authority. To predict the extent of these verdicts, we need only listen to the authorities’ rhetoric, which delves deeply into vilifying its opponents and calling them the most heinous names. We can only expect harsh sentences for alleged crimes that the investigation has been unable to prove.”
Laarayedh’s defence team considered the deportation case “a dangerous deviation from the legal course,” noting that it “has been a political case from the beginning, built on flawed assessments and not supported by facts or material evidence.”
The team asserted that since the beginning of the case, the prosecution has been unable to prove that Laarayedh has committed any unlawful act. The charges are limited to a political assessment of his performance when he served as Minister of the Interior. They stressed that investigations have proven that “the phenomenon of deportation was not prominent during that period.”
Laarayedh was not involved in and did not authorise any measure that would facilitate travel or violate the law, his lawyers insisted. “Rather, he was the first to warn of the seriousness of this phenomenon and took early practical measures, including imposing travel bans and parental consent, as well as strengthening monitoring at border crossings. Laarayedh repeatedly requested the official statistics regarding the numbers of those travelling to hotbeds of tension organised based on the travel dates, as he believed they would undoubtedly prove his innocence, but he request was denied.”
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