A Tunisian appeals court has sentenced a radio journalist to five years in prison for disclosing information about the country’s security services.
Khalifa Guesmi, of the Mosaique FM radio station, had appealed against a one-year term handed down in November before the sentence was increased under an anti-terrorism law.
Amira Mohamed, vice-president of the Tunisian journalists’ SNJT union, said: “This is the heaviest sentence pronounced by the Tunisian courts against a journalist. It presents a dangerous authoritarian drift and is a flagrant attack on the freedom of the press.”
Guesmi was found guilty of having taken part in intentionally disclosing “information relating to operations of interception, infiltration, audiovisual surveillance or data collection”, said his lawyer, Rahal Jallali.
A police officer, who had been found guilty of providing the information to the journalist, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on appeal, up from an initial three-year term.
Guesmi was arrested and held for a week in March last year, after the Radio Mosaique online service published a report on the dismantling of a “terrorist cell” and the arrest of its members.
Several local and international rights groups and labour organisations – including the Tunisian League for Human Rights and I Watch – issued a joint statement on Tuesday, denouncing the sentence as a “masquerade verdict” and a “major setback for the judicial system”.
They warned against “the seriousness of the repressive direction of the current authorities” and called on activists and civil society “to mobilise to defend freedoms and human rights”.
These groups have criticised the decline in civic freedoms in Tunisia since the president, Kais Saied, launched a sweeping power-grab in July 2021. In its report published in early May, the journalists’ union warned of “serious threats” to press freedom in the country.
On Monday, another court sentenced the Tunisian moderate Islamist leader Rached Ghannouchi to a year in prison for allegedly referring to police officers as tyrants in what his party said was a sham trial.
Ghannouchi, 81, a founder of the Ennahdha party, has refused to be removed from his place of detention for questioning or to attend the trial because the cases were “political settling of scores targeting opponents of the regime”, said the lawyer and former Ennahdha minister Samir Dilou.
Ghannouchi, a former parliamentary speaker, is the most prominent critic of Saied.
Ghannouchi was detained in mid-April on the charge of plotting against the security of the state. He has been called in several times for questioning on various matters, but this was the first time he was not released.
Monday’s case grew out of a complaint by a security union member who claimed that Ghannouchi used the word taghout, or tyrant, while eulogising a member of his party at a funeral in February last year. According to a tweet by Ghannouchi’s daughter Soumaya, her father said the deceased “did not fear poverty, ruler or tyrant”.
Ennahda condemned the decision to prosecute as “an unjust political ruling” and called for his immediate release.
Ghannouchi is also being investigated for what his party says is another case of twisting his words, in which he allegedly evoked the threat of civil war if Ennahdha and other opposition parties were excluded from the political scene.
His party said on its English-language Twitter account that Ghannouchi was charged with conspiracy against state security and ordered to remain in prison pending trial.
“Kais Saied is making a mockery of the judiciary, using it as a tool for political revenge and persecution,” his daughter tweeted.
Saied’s crackdown on his opponents comes amid growing social tensions and deepening economic troubles in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab spring pro-democracy movement more than a decade ago.
