The former president of Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission was arrested on allegations of ‘falsifying’ the commission’s report.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

Borghino: ‘Trumped-Up Charges’

A widening outcry this week is meeting the news that 73-year-0ld journalist and human rights activist Sihem Bensedrine has been arrested by authorities in her native Tunisia.

Bensedrine is a laureate of the International Publishers Association‘s (IPA) Freedom to Publish Prize, as it was known in 2009 when she won the award. That accolade is today (August 7) known as the Prix Voltaire, of course, and the program, directed by IPA’s James Taylor and administered by the IPA’s Freedom to Publish committee, is becoming among the best recognized and valued honor of its kind in the international humanitarian space.

Quickly reacting to the news of Bensedrine’s incarceration, IPA secretary-general José Borghino has issued a communique from his offices in Geneva, reminding the world’s largest federation of national, regional, and specialist publishers’ associations that Bensedrine is the former president of Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, established after the country’s 2010-to-2011 revolution.

The purpose of the commission over which Bensedrine presides, Borghino writes in his memo to thousands of publishing professional in close to 100 international markets, is “to collect testimony from victims of human-rights abuses by the former government of Tunisia and provide compensation and rehabilitation.”

Raising the alarm, he writes, “According to the reports we have received, Sihem Bensedrine has been arrested on trumped-up charges that are clearly politically motivated.

“Her important work at Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission must have been getting too close to the truth. It’s appalling that she’s treated in this way. She should be celebrated as a hero by the Tunisian authorities not treated as a criminal.”

Kristenn Einarsson, the chair of the IPA Freedom to Publish committee and the founding CEO of Norway’s World Expression Forum, WEXFO, joins Borghino in IPA’s message available to the world book publishing community, saying, “The arrest of Sihem Bensedrine is a terrible step backward for the freedom to publish situation in Tunisia.

“For decades, Ms. Bensedrine has been a shining example to the whole world as a journalist, a publisher, and a human-rights advocate.

“We urge the authorities to release her and reaffirm their support for freedom of expression and the freedom to publish.”

The IPA in its memo to its international membership today recalls Bensedrine speaking in 2019 at the IPA Africa Summit set in Nairobi in 2019—the year in which the commission delivered its final report.

Speaking about the freedom to publish, Bensedrine said, “The book is the place where memory is stored, and every book censored is a memory lost.”

Einarsson: ‘A Terrible Step Backward’

Bensedrine had been targeted in February 2023, when she was ordered not to leave Tunisian territory. Accounts of this latest action, as reviewed by Publishing Perspectives, indicate that Bensedrine was arrested on Thursday (August 1), on allegations of “conspiracy against state security.”

Writing for Le Monde from Tunis, Monia Ben Hamadi pulls no punches in targeting Tunisian president Kais Saied, writing that he “is trampling underfoot all the achievements of the democratic transition that followed the 2011 revolution. The latest symbol is the detention of Sihem Bensedrine, one of the country’s leading figures in the fight for human rights, on Thursday, August 1.”

In a report from Agence France-Presse, carried here by Barron’s, the charge leading to Bensedrine’s arrest on August 1 is described as “‘falsifying’ the Truth and Dignity Commission’s report. That report goes on to say, “Since a sweeping power grab orchestrated in 2021 by Tunisia’s current President Kais Saied, who was democratically elected in 2019, numerous political figures critical of him have been arrested.”

Among the sharpest critics of the Bensedrine arrest, the organization Attorneys Without Borders (Avocats Sans Frontieres) has produced a joint memo with some 20 signatory associations, claiming that Tunis’ action on “the prosecution and persecution of Ms. Bensedrine … reflects a clear desire to nullify the [commission’s] final report, which aims to dismantle the system of corruption and tyranny in place.”

The Truth and Dignity Commission

As Lilia Blaise reported for The New York Times on March 28, 2019, Bensedrine released the Truth and Dignity Commission’s report on “50 years of dictatorship” in Tunisia, “a devastating, 2,000-page archive of torture and human-rights violations intended to prevent the return of authoritarian rule.”

Bensedrine posted the entire Arabic-language document at the time on the commission’s site, and Blaise, in her report, called it “the product of four-and-a-half years of investigation by the commission, which was mandated by the Constitutional Assembly” following the 2011 and 2012 uprising that inspired the Arab Spring revolts, “most of which were followed by violent crackdowns and power struggles, if not civil war.”

Vivian Yee, also writing in the Times, in late July 2021, documented latter-day questions among Tunisians about the value of the revolts of years before. “Nearly a third of young people are jobless,” Yee reported, “public services are foundering and corruption has increasingly infiltrated daily life.”

Bensedrine in a comment to Yee, clarified the kind of futility that many in the country saw in the results of the effort to throw off autocracy. “With today’s democracy,” Bensedrine told Yee, “they may not be able to eat. But they have the freedom to fight for what they want.”

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More from Publishing Perspectives on the “trinity of freedoms”—to publish, to read, and to self-expression—is here, more on the Prix Voltaire is here, and more on the Tunisian publishing market is here.

Publishing Perspectives is the International Publishers Association’s world media partner.