On the occasion of International Migrants Day organized this Wednesday, December 18, a Tunisian NGO called for demonstrations in the form of a sit-in in front of the municipal theater of Tunis to denounce the criminalization of aid to migrants in the country. She also intended to protest against the treatment reserved for those from sub-Saharan Africa, a large part of whom still live very precariously in Tunisia.
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With our correspondent in Tunis, Lilia Blaise
Very few of them – less than forty people from civil society and families of those missing at sea – responded to the call of the NGO Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) in front of the theater municipal of Tunis, this Wednesday, December 18. On the occasion of International Migrants Day, it intended to organize a rally to denounce European migration policies and the treatment reserved for migrants in Tunisiabut the subject is of little interest to Tunisian public opinion. Although it remains extremely topical, it fails to compete with the socio-economic issues which are of much greater concern to Tunisians.
Since May 2024, however, nearly eight civil society activists who expressed solidarity with migrants or worked on migration issues have been imprisoned. In the majority of cases, the latter are accused of financial mismanagement – or even money laundering through their associations –, a process of intimidation intended to muzzle them, like many other civil society organizations which act subject to repeated tax audits in recent months, according to the FTDES.
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The latest arrest was only a few days ago. On December 13, Saloua Grissa, the director of an association which works on the defense of minorities and fights against racial discrimination in Bizerte, in the north of Tunisia, was arrested. Its structure, which had been the subject of an investigation for four months, is in the crosshairs of the authorities for having received suspicious foreign financing.
In this context, the FTDES also took advantage of today’s sit-in to call for the recognition of the rights of migrants and the immediate release of their defenders currently incarcerated. The Tunisian League for Human Rights, for its part, published a press release to urge the government to respect its commitments regarding the protection of migrants.
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