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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 It repealed Penal Code Article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September, the Ministry of Justice repealed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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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