Amid Attacks on Tunisia’s Civil Society, Lawyers Are Both Shields and Targets

A prominent Tunisian lawyer was arrested live on television in May 2024. Not in a courtroom. Not after a verdict. On air, mid-sentence, while criticizing government policy — dragged away from a broadcast set as the cameras kept rolling. That image, of Sonia Dahmani being hauled out of a television studio by plainclothes officers, tells you everything about where Tunisia is right now.

What is actually at stake here is not just one lawyer’s freedom. It is whether Tunisia — once the Arab Spring’s sole democratic survivor, the country that received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for its democratic transition — completes its slide into full authoritarian rule. The lawyers of Tunisia have become the clearest flashpoint in that fight: simultaneously the most organized remaining defenders of civil liberties and the most exposed targets of a government that understands exactly how dangerous organized legal professionals can be.

How Tunisia Went from Nobel Peace Prize Democracy to “Not Free” in a Decade

Tunisia’s democratic experiment was always fragile. But for a decade after the Jasmine Revolution of 2010–2011 ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after 23 years of authoritarian rule, it functioned. The internationally praised 2014 Constitution established genuine judicial independence, a bicameral legislature, and enforceable civil liberties. The National Dialogue Quartet — including the lawyers’ bar association — won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for holding the transition together. That is the baseline against which what followed must be measured.

Kais Saied, a constitutional law professor elected in October 2019 with 73% of the vote on an anti-corruption platform, executed what critics correctly call a constitutional coup. On July 25, 2021, he suspended Parliament, dismissed the prime minister, and began ruling by decree. The Supreme Judicial Council was dissolved in February 2022. In its place, Saied installed a Temporary Supreme Judicial Council under executive control. In a single day in June 2022, 57 judges were summarily dismissed — a purge condemned by every major international legal body. A new constitution, approved in July 2022 with just 30.5% voter turnout, concentrated power in the presidency and gutted the institutional checks that had defined Tunisia’s democratic decade. Freedom House, which had rated Tunisia “Partly Free” through most of the transition period, downgraded the country to “Not Free” in its 2023 Freedom in the World Report. That is not a bureaucratic classification. That is a verdict.

Decree-Law 54, Bar Association Strikes, and the Arrest of Lawyers in Real Time

Decree-Law 54, enacted in September 2022, is the legal instrument that made everything worse. On paper it targets the spread of “false news.” In practice it criminalizes dissent. The law carries penalties of up to five years in prison, rising to ten if the alleged offense involves civil servants or state institutions. By the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) count, more than 20 lawyers have been arrested, detained, or placed under formal investigation since 2022. Journalists, opposition politicians, and civil society leaders face the same statute. The Dahmani arrest was not an aberration — it was a demonstration.

The National Bar Association of Tunisia (Ordre National des Avocats de Tunisie), with approximately 12,000 registered members, has been the most institutionally coherent source of resistance. Its leverage comes from a simple fact: lawyers can strike. They can refuse to appear in court. They can make the justice system — the very mechanism Saied needs to legitimize his prosecutions — grind to a halt. The Bar has used this power deliberately. What it cannot do is protect its own members from arrest.

The specific events that have defined the crackdown since 2022 include:

• February 2023: Mass arrests sweep up lawyers Chaima Issa and Lazhar Akremi alongside opposition politicians in what the government labeled a terrorism investigation — a characterization condemned internationally as a pretext for political persecution.
• 2023: Veteran human rights lawyer and former judge Abdelraouf Ayadi arrested as part of the so-called “Conspiracy against State Security” crackdown targeting political opponents.
• October 2023: The Bar calls a nationwide general strike after lawyers are systematically barred from accessing clients held in pre-trial detention — a direct violation of the right to legal defense.
• May 2024: Sonia Dahmani arrested live on television during a broadcast after criticizing government migration policy; charged under Decree-Law 54. Her case becomes an international emblem of the crackdown.
• Ongoing: Dozens of NGOs subject to financial investigations or ordered to suspend operations; foreign-funded civil society organizations increasingly labeled as agents of destabilization.

The EU, for its part, signed a migration control partnership with Tunisia in July 2023 worth €105 million — prioritizing Mediterranean border management over any democratic conditionality. For coverage of how geopolitical interests consistently override human rights concerns in regional politics, see our worldwide political news analysis.

Saied, the Bar Association, and the Judges Saied Already Broke: The Three Pillars of This Confrontation

Kais Saied

Kais Saied is not a crude strongman. He is a former constitutional law professor who speaks in the language of popular sovereignty and anti-corruption while systematically dismantling every institution that could hold him accountable. His political genius was electoral: he ran as an outsider against a discredited party system in 2019 and won 73% of the vote. His political strategy since has been to exploit that mandate to its logical authoritarian conclusion — framing every critic as a foreign agent, every NGO as a destabilizer, and every lawyer who defends a political prisoner as complicit in the threat. The government has explicitly accused foreign-funded civil society organizations of acting against national security, rhetoric that tracks closely with the playbook used across other authoritarian consolidations globally.

The National Bar Association

The National Bar Association occupies a unique position. Unlike most civil society organizations, it has formal institutional standing: the right to strike, the right to issue legal opinions, the right to refuse participation in proceedings it deems illegitimate. Sarah Yerkes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has described Tunisia’s lawyers as “the last organized institutional check on Saied’s consolidation of power.” That is precisely right — and precisely why they are targets. The Bar’s former head Bechir Essid and its leadership have repeatedly issued formal condemnations of colleague arrests, organized work stoppages, and maintained public visibility on cases the government would prefer to quietly process. The Bar cannot be dissolved as easily as a parliament. That is its strength. That is also why the pressure on individual members is relentless.

The Gutted Judiciary

The third pillar — or rather, the absence of a pillar — is the Tunisian judiciary, which no longer functions as an independent check on anything. When Saied dismissed 57 judges in a single day in June 2022 and replaced the Supreme Judicial Council with an executive-controlled body, he did not just weaken the courts. He turned them into instruments of prosecution. Lawyers who take on political cases now appear before judges who serve at the pleasure of the executive. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) issued a formal statement in 2023 condemning both the judicial purge and the use of terrorism statutes against lawyers and opponents. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers has called for the release of detained legal professionals. Neither intervention has produced a single release.

Why the EU’s Migration Money and the Opposition’s Disorganization Are Both Making This Worse

The comfortable story told in Western capitals is that Tunisia is a complicated case — a young democracy struggling with economic pressure, political dysfunction, and migration flows that affect European shores. That framing is a moral and analytical failure. Complicated cases don’t involve presidents arresting lawyers live on television. They don’t involve 57 judges fired in a day. The EU’s €105 million migration partnership with Saied, struck in July 2023 under the lead of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is a straightforward transaction: European governments pay Tunisia to keep migrants from crossing the Mediterranean, and in exchange they avert their eyes from what is happening to Tunisian civil society. Monica Marks of NYU Abu Dhabi has called this approach “effectively greenlighting” Tunisia’s democratic collapse. That assessment is hard to argue with.

The Tunisian opposition carries its own failures. Fragmented across Islamist, secular-liberal, and leftist factions that spent the 2014–2021 democratic period in corrosive infighting, the opposition has never coalesced into a force capable of challenging Saied electorally or in the streets. The February 2023 arrests — which swept up figures including Chaima Issa and Lazhar Akremi alongside civil society leaders — targeted people who were already failing to coordinate effectively. Saied did not crack down on a unified resistance. He cracked down on a fragmented one, and the fragmentation made the crackdown easier. The international legal community, to its credit, has been vocal — but vocal condemnation without economic consequence is just noise. The erosion of judicial independence is a pattern visible across multiple democratic systems right now; what makes Tunisia distinctive is the speed and completeness of the collapse.

Three specific failures across stakeholders deserve naming directly:

• The EU’s failure: Conditioning €105 million on border management while attaching zero enforceable democratic conditionality sends an unambiguous signal that European governments value migration control more than Tunisian lawyers’ freedom.
• The opposition’s failure: Years of parliamentary dysfunction and factional infighting gave Saied the political oxygen to frame his 2021 power grab as a necessary corrective — a narrative that found real purchase with voters exhausted by deadlock.
• The international legal community’s failure: Statements from the ICJ and the UN Special Rapporteur are important but insufficient. Without coordinated diplomatic and economic pressure tied to the release of detained lawyers and the restoration of judicial independence, they function as moral comfort rather than practical leverage.

Four Scenarios for Tunisia’s Lawyers and What Each Means for the Country’s Democratic Future

Where does this go? The honest answer is that the trajectory is bad and the variables are limited. But the specific shape of what comes next matters enormously — both for Tunisians and for the North African precedent this sets. Consider how similar dynamics have unfolded in other countries where institutional erosion accelerates under economic pressure.

• Scenario 1 — The Bar is legally weakened: Saied moves to reform or restrict the National Bar Association’s independent status, mirroring what he did with the judiciary. This would mark the decisive institutional collapse — the last organized civil society body with leverage would lose it. Probability increases if IMF negotiations over the stalled $1.9 billion loan fail and economic pressure forces Saied to accelerate domestic control.
• Scenario 2 — International pressure forces limited concessions: A combination of sustained EU diplomatic pressure, conditioned on the stalled IMF loan negotiations, produces releases of some detained lawyers and a tactical retreat on Decree-Law 54 prosecutions. Saied retains power but faces real costs. This requires coordinated pressure that has not materialized so far.
• Scenario 3 — Economic crisis produces political rupture: Tunisia’s economy — facing 10%+ inflation, IMF disagreements, and declining foreign investment — deteriorates to the point where Saied’s popular support collapses. The Bar and civil society organizations become focal points for a broader mobilization. This is the most hopeful scenario and the one that depends on the most variables outside anyone’s control.
• Scenario 4 — Full authoritarian consolidation: Lawyer arrests continue, the Bar is progressively intimidated into silence, Decree-Law 54 prosecutions normalize, and Tunisia settles into a stable authoritarian equilibrium with EU migration money providing the economic buffer that prevents collapse. This is, currently, the most likely trajectory.

Tunisia’s lawyers are caught in a trap of their own institutional success. They are organized enough to resist, visible enough to be noticed, and exposed enough to be arrested. The National Bar Association’s 12,000 members represent something genuinely rare in the current Tunisian landscape: a body with the legal standing, the collective discipline, and the public legitimacy to say no to Kais Saied and make it mean something. That is exactly why the camera was rolling when they came for Sonia Dahmani. The message was not just for her. Ask yourself what it means for a democracy when arresting a lawyer on live television is considered a manageable political cost — and then ask who pays that cost if the world keeps looking away.

About The Author

Sophie Gesture

Political writer and analyst focused on global affairs, public policy, and emerging political trends.

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