Amnesty International Report 2017/18

366

Amnesty International Report 2017/18

men to two months’ imprisonment for “public 

indecency” for designing and wearing a T-

shirt with a slogan suggesting that police 

officers are morally corrupt. In July, rap 

singer Ahmed Ben Ahmed was assaulted by 

a group of police officers who were supposed 

to be providing security for his concert, 

because they were offended that his songs 

were insulting to the police. A police union 

later filed a complaint before the Court of 

First Instance in Mahdia against Ahmed Ben 

Ahmed for the Penal Code crime of “insulting 

state officials”.

In June, the Court of First Instance in Bizert 

convicted at least five people of “public 

indecency” for publicly smoking during the 

day during Ramadan.

4

On 8 September, the authorities arbitrarily 

expelled Prince Hicham Al Alaoui, a cousin 

and vocal critic of Morocco’s King Mohamed 

VI, from Tunisia as he arrived to attend a 

conference on democratic transitions.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

In July, Parliament adopted the Law on 

Eliminating Violence against Women which 

brought several guarantees for the protection 

of women and girls from gender-based 

violence. It repealed Penal Code Article 

227 bis that had allowed men accused of 

raping a woman or girl under the age of 20 to 

escape prosecution by marrying her.

In August, President Essebsi called on 

Parliament to reform the discriminatory 

inheritance law and created a commission 

mandated to propose legal reforms to ensure 

gender equality. The commission had not 

delivered its report by the end of the year. In 

September, the Ministry of Justice repealed 

the 1973 directive prohibiting marriage 

between a Tunisian woman and a non-

Muslim man.

In a cabinet reshuffle in September the 

number of women ministers was decreased 

from four to three out of 28 ministerial posts, 

leaving women severely under-represented in 

government.

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

The Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD), 

created in 2013 to address human rights 

violations committed between July 1955 and 

December 2013, held 11 public sessions 

during the year. During these sessions, 

victims and perpetrators testified on a range 

of violations including election fraud, 

enforced disappearance and torture. There 

was no progress on the adoption of a 

memorandum of understanding between the 

IVD and the Ministry of Justice to allow for 

the referral of cases to specialized judicial 

chambers. Government institutions including 

the Ministries of the Interior, Defence, and 

Justice continued to fail to provide the IVD 

with the information it requested for its 

investigations. The Military Justice system 

refused to hand over to the IVD the case files 

of the trials of those accused of killing 

protesters during the 2011 uprising and of 

victims of police repression during Siliana 

protests in 2012.

In September, Parliament passed a 

controversial Administrative Reconciliation 

Law, first proposed by President Essebsi in 

2015. The law had been long opposed by 

opposition political parties, civil society 

groups and the campaign group Manich 

Msameh (“I will not forgive”) because it offers 

immunity to public servants involved in 

corruption and misappropriation of public 

funds if they were obeying orders and had 

derived no personal benefit. A group of MPs 

filed a challenge before the Provisional 

Authority for the Examination of the 

Constitutionality of Draft Laws, arguing that 

the law was unconstitutional; the Provisional 

Authority’s inability to reach a majority 

decision resulted in the law being enacted.

RIGHT TO WATER

The water shortage in Tunisia became more 

acute with water supplies to dams falling 

42% below the annual average. In August, 

the Minister of Agriculture, Water Resources 

and Fisheries stated that the government did 

not have a national strategy for water 

distribution, thereby making it impossible to 

ensure equitable access.

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Amnesty International Report 2017/18

367

Water shortages in recent years 

disproportionately affected the distribution of 

water and resulted in repeated water cuts in 

marginalized regions leading to local protests 

throughout 2017. In September, residents of 

the small town of Deguech in Tozeur region 

organized a protest in front of the local 

authority’s office demanding a solution to the 

regular cuts in running water that the region 

had suffered throughout the summer. In July, 

some neighbourhoods of Redeyef in the 

region of Gafsa suffered more than one 

month without running water, and towns 

including Moulares had running water for 

only a few hours per day. In March, the NGO 

Tunisian Water Observatory announced that it 

had registered 615 water cuts and 250 

protests related to access to water.

DEATH PENALTY

Courts handed down at least 25 death 

sentences following trials related to national 

security. Defence lawyers appealed against 

the sentences. No executions have been 

carried out since 1991.

1. Tunisia: Changes to passport law will ease arbitrary restrictions on 

travel (

News story

, 26 May)

2. Tunisia: Journalists prosecuted for criticizing conduct of security 

forces (

News story

, 15 May)

3. "We want an end to the fear": Abuses under Tunisia’s state of 

emergency (

MDE 30/4911/2017

)

4. Tunisia: Fifth man facing jail term for breaking fast during Ramadan 

(

News story

, 13 June)

TURKEY

Republic of Turkey

Head of state: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Head of government: Binali Yıldırım

An ongoing state of emergency set a 

backdrop for violations of human rights. 

Dissent was ruthlessly suppressed, with 

journalists, political activists and human 

rights defenders among those targeted. 

Instances of torture continued to be 

reported, but in lower numbers than in the 

weeks following the coup attempt of July 

2016. Any effective investigation of human 

rights violations by state officials was 

prevented by pervasive impunity. Abuses by 

armed groups continued, including two 

attacks in January. However, there were no 

further bombing attacks targeting members 

of the general population that had been 

such a regular occurrence in previous years. 

No resolution was found for the situation of 

people displaced within the southeast of 

the country. Turkey continued to host one of 

the largest refugee populations in the world, 

with more than 3 million registered Syrian 

refugees alone, but risks of forcible return 

persisted.

BACKGROUND

The state of emergency, imposed following an 

attempted coup in July 2016, remained in 

force throughout the year. It paved the way 

for unlawful restrictions on human rights and 

allowed the government to pass laws beyond 

the effective scrutiny of Parliament and the 

courts.

After having been remanded in prison 

detention in 2016, nine parliamentarians 

from the Kurdish-rooted leftist Peoples’ 

Democracy Party (HDP), including the party’s 

two leaders, remained in prison during the 

whole year. Sixty elected mayors of the 

Democratic Regions Party, the sister party of 

the HDP, representing constituencies in the 

predominantly Kurdish east and southeast of 

Turkey, also remained in prison. The 

unelected officials who replaced them 

continued in office throughout 2017. In 

October, six elected mayors, including those 

representing the capital, Ankara, and 

Istanbul, were left with no option but to resign 

after being requested to do so by the 

President. As a result, a third of Turkey’s 

population was not being represented by the 

people they had elected at the 2016 local 

elections.

Over 50,000 people were in pre-trial 

detention on charges linked to membership 

of the “Fethullahist Terrorist 

Organization” (FETÖ), which the authorities 

blamed for the 2016 coup attempt. A similar 

number were released on bail and were 

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