Demands That Transcend Professional Grievances

On the surface, the Tunisian Order of Lawyers lists six grievances: judicial sector reform, improved working conditions, the restoration of the Supreme Council of Magistrates, modernization of court infrastructure, the sustainability of the lawyers’ pension fund, and an end to prosecutions targeting certain bar members. In reality, these demands point toward a more serious diagnosis: that of a judicial apparatus in disrepair, directed from the top by the state executive.

Boubaker Blathaout, the bar’s dean, articulated the underlying stakes during the first gathering: “We defend our right to freedom, we guarantee fair trials, and we demand that justice not be used as an instrument of political conflict.” This seemingly basic assertion carries outsized symbolic weight in the current Tunisian context. It signals that the legal profession has grown weary of functioning as a willing extra in a system where judicial robes too often conform to the wishes of those in power.

The lawyers’ placards conveyed the same message with cutting directness: “No to the dismissal of the bar’s demands. No to the denial of justice.” Other signs read: “No restriction of the right to defense,” and “Guarantees of fair trial must exist.” These are not the slogans of a professional association seeking mere salary increases. They are declarations about the nature of state power itself.

The Crux: A Supreme Council in Limbo Since 2022

The fixation on the Supreme Council of Magistrates is not coincidental. After President Kais Saied’s seizure of power in February 2022—which brought about the dissolution of this institution—lawyers expected a swift restoration of this constitutional safeguard. Yet four years later, the CSM remains quasi-nonexistent as a functioning body. This absence is not a matter of bureaucratic sluggishness; it reflects a deliberate intent to keep judges dependent on executive will.

Without this council, magistrates lack any meaningful protection against political pressure. Appointments, transfers, and dismissals now flow from administrative decisions made without institutional counterweight. Lawyers view this situation as symptomatic of a deeper pathology: the progressive instrumentalization of judicial power. Several attorneys have themselves faced criminal prosecutions for alleged financial corruption—charges they regard as retaliatory measures.

The question haunting the bar is uncomfortable but essential: In a state where the executive controls judicial outcomes, can there be justice? The international legal community has answered this question with mounting alarm. The International Commission of Jurists, Amnesty International, and MEDEL (the Mechanism for Cooperation among the Maghreb and West) have all issued reports documenting what they describe as a “grave erosion” of judicial independence in Tunisia.

Government Silence as a Form of Response

When confronted with this mobilization, the government has chosen indifference. Leïla Jaffel, Minister of Justice since October 2021, has consistently refused substantive dialogue with the bar association. The ministry went so far as to announce, even before the strike began, that courts would operate normally—a gesture of pure defiance. No offer of compromise. No opening to negotiation. Only refusal to listen.

This posture reveals something consequential: the executive views the judicial branch as its exclusive prerogative. By ignoring the bar’s demands, it sends a message to judges who might still harbor doubts about their subordination: independence is not a right but a revocable privilege.

A Judicial System Corroded by Institutional Breakdown

The lawyers’ strike does not emerge from nowhere. It responds to manifest deterioration across the judicial sector. International reports converge on a shared diagnosis: Tunisia’s judicial independence is undergoing systematic erosion.

The magistrates themselves have sounded alarms. The Tunisian Association of Judges has noted that the 2025-2026 judicial year marks the third consecutive year without institutional guarantees of independence. Rule-of-law violations accumulate: opposition politicians tried via videoconference on charges of “conspiracy against state security,” prolonged detention without procedural safeguards, a judicial system patently segmented along political lines.

Parallel to these political machinations, material conditions have deteriorated. Court clerks are understaffed. Buildings decay. Case delays stretch indefinitely. For lawyers—already accustomed to navigating a system grown hostile to robust defense—this combination breeds exhaustion. After years of unanswered requests for dialogue, patience has curdled into resistance.

The Contours of a Political Impasse

This strike exposes a fundamental contradiction at the heart of post-2022 Tunisia. The country adopted a constitution in 2014 whose Article 102 explicitly enshrines judicial independence. But once a president decides to exercise power differently, that independence becomes an inconvenient obstacle to be circumscribed or eliminated.

Lawyers striking today are not fighting for salary increases or shorter hours. They are fighting for the professional capacity itself—which is to say, fighting for the fundamental right of every person to competent legal defense. When the state renders the practice of defense impossible, it dismantles the foundations of rule of law.

The government, for its part, appears to be betting on attrition. It calculates that lawyers, facing lost income from the strike, will eventually accept the status quo. But this calculation overlooks a crucial social reality: no large-scale professional mobilization remains confined to its original grievances for long. It becomes symbolic, a crystallization of broader collective frustration. In a Tunisia already fatigued by political instability, the lawyers’ movement may well become a warning sign for growing swaths of the population.

The Critical Weeks Ahead

The timeline is compressed. Regional strikes will be staged through June 8th, followed by the national gathering on June 18th. If the bar achieves the level of mobilization it anticipates, courts could genuinely grind to a halt. No democracy has ever endured for long without a functioning judicial apparatus, however imperfect.

Two scenarios remain possible. In the first, the government makes partial concessions: it opens dialogue, accepts some reforms, restores the Supreme Council. This would require the executive to acknowledge limits to its power. In the second scenario, the strike persists, tensions escalate, and collateral damage mounts—hesitant investors, eroded public confidence, international legitimacy questioned.

Between these paths, the government has not yet chosen. Perhaps it has not yet grasped that the choice is urgent.

A Democracy at a Crossroads

The mobilization of Tunisia’s lawyers raises a broader question: Can a regime long prosper by evacuating its institutions of meaning? The answer Tunisia provides in the coming weeks will reveal much about its capacity to construct a durable rule of law—or its capitulation before that task

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The Law as an Instrument of Silencing

There is a cruel irony in the method. What characterizes the repression denounced by the UN is not, primarily, heavy-handed arrests or arbitrary closures. It is the law itself — or rather, its distorted use — that serves as the lever. Audits invoked at carefully chosen moments, administrative irregularities brandished as pretexts, decrees drafted in deliberately vague terms: a set of legal tools that make it possible to paralyze, without striking a visible blow, decades of civic and human rights work.

The suspension, on Tuesday, of Avocats Sans Frontières for a period of thirty days by a Tunisian court is the most recent illustration. The organization, whose teams work with the most vulnerable populations, found itself overnight unable to carry out any of its missions. A few days earlier, it was the Tunisian League for Human Rights that had suffered the same fate — an institution founded in 1977, a pioneer in the Arab world, brought to a standstill by a court ruling.

For Volker Türk, the pattern is now too consistent to be coincidental. “We are observing a growing trend in which Tunisian authorities are resorting to the use of judicially imposed sanctions to curb the exercise of the right to freedom of association, with the barest consideration for the principles of legality, necessity and proportionality required for such limitations to be permissible,” he stated.

Journalists Behind Bars for Doing Their Job

While civil society organizations navigate administrative courts, the independent press faces prison cells. On April 24, journalist Zied El Heni was arrested and placed in pre-trial detention. The charge: a penal provision criminalizing the use of telecommunication networks to “harm others” — a formulation so broad it can apply to virtually any form of critical reporting or commentary.

His case is part of a pattern that is far from incidental. The previous year, twenty-eight journalists — among them Mourad Zghidi — had been arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to various prison terms for acts directly related to the exercise of their profession. The primary legislative tool deployed against them is a 2022 decree-law officially dedicated to combating cybercrime, but whose broadly worded provisions allow authorities to pursue journalists for articles, interviews or public statements.

It is precisely this text that the UN is urging Tunisian lawmakers to revise. An amendment process is reportedly underway, but its outcome remains uncertain. Türk was unambiguous in his demand: “I urge the Tunisian authorities to release immediately and unconditionally all those detained or imprisoned for having expressed their views, protected under international human rights law, and to lift all arbitrary restrictions on the freedoms of expression and association.”

The Long Shadow of the 2021 Power Shift

To understand the trajectory that led to this situation, one must return to the summer of 2021. On July 25 of that year, President Kaïs Saïed suspended parliament, assumed sweeping executive powers and launched a constitutional overhaul that resulted, in 2022, in the adoption of a new foundational text concentrating authority overwhelmingly in the hands of the executive. This institutional power grab, described by its supporters as a “correction of the course,” was seen by opponents — and by much of the international community — as a clear break with the gains of the 2011 revolution.

For it is precisely that legacy which is now at stake. Tunisia had been, in the aftermath of the uprising that toppled Ben Ali, the only country of the Arab Spring to have successfully transitioned toward a pluralist system. A progressive constitution, free elections, a thriving civil society: achievements that earned the country, in 2015, the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the National Dialogue Quartet.

Today, the UN also raises the alarm over the absence of a functioning constitutional court — an institution essential to ensuring that laws and decisions respect citizens’ fundamental rights. Without this safeguard, legal recourse remains limited and abuses difficult to contain. “Tunisia’s democratic and human rights gains after 2011 must be maintained, not progressively dismantled,” warned Volker Türk, in terms that sound less like a recommendation than a stark warning.

Behind the diplomatic language and official communiqués, a fundamental question now looms with growing urgency: how far is the international community willing to go to ensure that its warnings amount to something more than statements without consequence? And within Tunisia itself, what forces — political, legal, social — still hold enough weight to influence a trajectory that the UN, without equivocation, judges to be deeply troubling?

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An uncompromising stance on a fractured world

Delegates at the PPDS central council April 2026 session did not shy away from grand geopolitical pronouncements. Their final text starts with a global diagnosis. The party argues that the recurring crises of capitalism are pushing imperialist powers, led by the United States, to multiply conflicts in a desperate attempt to maintain control. They point to the decline of the dollar and the rise of alternative currencies as signs that a new world order is struggling to be born.

The communiqué then moves through a litany of solidarities. It condemns what it calls the “American-Zionist aggression against Iran,” affirming Tehran’s right to defend its sovereignty. It expresses support for Venezuela’s President Maduro, denouncing his “kidnapping,” and stands with Cuba against the US blockade and threats of invasion. The party also accuses France of mobilizing terrorist groups to destabilize the Sahel region, while voicing solidarity with what it sees as revolutionary movements crushed under “fascist” regimes in Turkey and India. On the Arab front, the PPDS is unequivocal: full support for Palestinian resistance in Gaza, rejection of normalization with Israel, and solidarity with Lebanese resistance fighters facing attempts at disarmament.

Tunisia: a long list of grievances against the Saied government

It is on the national level, however, that the PPDS central council April 2026 offers its most detailed and pointed critique. The party insists Tunisia’s current crisis is not circumstantial. They say it is the direct result of economic policies that perpetuate colonial-era dependencies. The communiqué attacks the government’s gradual dismantling of subsidy systems, specifically citing the withdrawal of subsidized products and the promotion of alternatives like “bran bread” – measures they say attack the right to food and burden the poorest.

The council also holds the president and parliament responsible for what it views as attacks on national sovereignty in renewable energy. The ratification of new concessions in Gafsa, Sidi Bouzid, Gabès, and Kairouan is seen as a step towards privatizing the national electricity and gas company, STEG. On freedoms, the PPDS demands the repeal of Decree-Law 54 and the establishment of the long-awaited Constitutional Court. It rejects restrictions on political activity and expresses solidarity with the powerful UGTT trade union federation, which it says is being targeted by “arbitrary measures.” The party also demands the immediate release of Ghassen Henchiri, a member of its political bureau, imprisoned on charges it calls “unfounded.” Finally, the council condemns rising racist speech in Tunisia, holding the “Saïed regime” fully responsible.

A fragmented left searching for a common path

The PPDS central council April 2026 session takes place in a Tunisian political landscape that has been profoundly reshaped since July 25, 2021, when President Saïed seized near-total control. While Saïed successfully sidelined the once-dominant Ennahdha movement and the old guard of Nidaa Tounes, the radical left has not prospered. The PPDS remains an extra-parliamentary force. Its real influence is felt more in grassroots union committees and pro-Palestinian solidarity campaigns than in electoral politics. The collapse of the Popular Front, a previous leftist coalition, has left a void that the PPDS has struggled to fill.

Nouri Beltoumi, the PPDS’s secretary-general, has repeatedly called for unity. But attempts to build a “national progressive front” keep stalling amid ideological differences and personal rivalries. The economic backdrop is grim. Inflation has hovered above 10% for much of the past year. Official unemployment stands near 17%, and shortages of basic goods have sparked localized protests. Migration, another issue the PPDS raised, has become deeply toxic after President Saïed’s past remarks about “hordes” of sub-Saharan migrants and recent street clashes in Sfax. In this context, the PPDS’s message – blending anti-imperialism, social justice, and defense of liberties – resonates with a hard core of activists but has yet to break through to a wider, exhausted population.

A radical voice, an uncertain echo

The Conseil central du PPDS avril 2026 has spoken. Its members leave Tunis with a detailed roadmap for opposition, yet the path ahead remains unclear. The party’s call for a “national progressive front” free from Islamists, Destourians, and the Salvation Front is ambitious. But can this radical diagnosis, powerful in its internal consistency, overcome the deep fragmentation of the Tunisian left and translate into a popular movement? The PPDS is betting that the rising cost of living and the steady squeeze on public freedoms will eventually provide an opening. For now, though, the party remains more of a critical observer than a credible alternative, its voice clear but its echo in the streets of Tunis still uncertain.

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