Across the sidewalks outside Tunis’s Court of First Instance, small, steady gatherings have become a routine sight in recent weeks. demonstrators from varying walks of life gather here: some demand safeguards for the democratic freedoms Tunisians have long fought for, while others push back against what they label arbitrary administrative suspensions that target their work. What unites all these protesters is a shared concern: the steady erosion of civic space in Tunisia, a shift that many activists and regional observers warn is growing into a permanent new reality.
Over the past 24 months, dozens of non-governmental organizations across this North African Maghreb nation have been hit with 30-day administrative suspensions and court-ordered threats of full dissolution. The crackdown has accelerated in recent months, with some of the country’s most prominent and respected civil society groups landing in authorities’ crosshairs.
Among the targeted organizations is the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH), Africa’s oldest human rights group and a core member of the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet. That quartet was awarded the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize for its foundational work steering Tunisia through its post-uprising democratic transition. Also targeted is Belgium-based Lawyers Without Borders (ASF). The Al Khatt foundation, owner of award-winning independent investigative media outlet Inkyfada, has also faced the same punitive measures. Inkyfada was initially suspended for 30 days and is now facing full dissolution, with a critical court hearing scheduled for Monday.
“It all started in October 2025 with a sudden, one-month suspension designed to silence our publications,” Manel Lassoued, Inkyfada’s editorial director, told Middle East Eye. “But we didn’t stop. We kept working and appealed the decision, trusting in our fundamental right to a defense and an impartial justice system.”
Lassoued’s outlet is far from alone. The Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, Aswat Nissa, Nawaat, the International Commission of Jurists and the World Organisation Against Torture are just a handful of the additional groups that have received court-ordered suspensions. The crackdown comes against a backdrop of steady erosion of the political and civil liberties gained after the 2011 Tunisian uprising, a shift that began five years ago when President Kais Saied seized sweeping executive power.
On 25 July 2021, Saied dissolved the sitting government, froze parliamentary activity, and began ruling by decree—a move that rights organizations have characterized as a steady slide toward authoritarian rule. He later pushed through a new constitution that vastly expanded presidential authority, while increasing pressure on independent institutional checkpoints including the Supreme Judicial Council, which has been effectively stripped of all regulatory and oversight powers.
This sweeping institutional overhaul has been paired with a wide-ranging campaign of arrests and administrative harassment targeting civil society groups working across nearly every sector, from human rights documentation and migration policy to anti-corruption investigation and social justice advocacy. Current reports indicate that roughly 600 organizations are now under formal government investigation.
Tunisian authorities justify the crackdown by framing the measures as a crackdown on suspicious foreign funding and a defense of national interests. But international rights groups including Amnesty International dismiss this framing as a transparent excuse to intimidate independent NGOs and further narrow space for civic action.
Amnesty’s analysis finds that what began as low-level intimidation, arbitrary regulatory restrictions, asset freezes and politically motivated prosecutions of NGO staff has now escalated into a coordinated effort to use the country’s judiciary to shutter independent civil society organizations entirely. Under current Tunisian law—specifically Decree-Law No 88, which regulates association activity—groups face a three-step punitive process: an initial administrative warning, followed by temporary suspension, and ultimately full dissolution. Multiple prominent organizations have already reached the final, permanent dissolution stage, including Inkyfada and Mnemty, a Tunis-based anti-racism association. Mnemty’s founder, Saadia Mosbah, has been in detention for two years and was recently sentenced to eight years in prison on financial misconduct charges that supporters call politically motivated.
Lamine Benghazi, head of advocacy for the Euro-Mediterranean region at ASF, told Middle East Eye that the crackdown extends far beyond individual organizations. “The entire institutional framework inherited from the democratic transition has been targeted,” he explained. “But it is not only about institutions: these authorities want to erase the entire political system. They are trying to erase an entire political ecosystem – one that includes the media, associations and trade unions.”
The April 2026 suspension of LTDH sparked widespread public outrage, with hundreds of demonstrators gathering on Tunis’s central Avenue Bourguiba to protest the decision. LTDH was one of the last independent organizations still granted access to Tunisian prisons, where dozens of dissidents, journalists and political opponents are currently detained.
“We consider the suspension to be a political decision disguised as a judicial one as it comes within a context of restricting civic space and targeting independent organisations that are fighting for human rights in Tunisia,” LTDH president Bassem Trifi told Amnesty International. “Beyond targeting human rights organisations, human rights and freedoms are being severely undermined, especially the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly.”
Sihem Bensedrine, one of Tunisia’s most prominent veteran civil society leaders and a journalist who previously led the post-2011 Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD), was among the protesters who turned out to support LTDH. The IVD was the independent body tasked with investigating systemic human rights abuses committed under former presidents Habib Bourguiba and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, as well as crimes committed during the 2011 uprising that ousted Ben Ali. Bensedrine was arrested in August 2024 on charges of falsifying the IVD’s final public report. She was released only in February 2025, after a months-long hunger strike that severely damaged her health. She still carries the physical and psychological scars of what she calls unjust detention, and currently faces multiple additional trials linked to her work with the IVD.
“They are using new repressive techniques: they do not directly shut down associations, they suspend them,” she told Middle East Eye. “And this is even more insidious than simply banning activities, because it aims to spread fear and create a reflex of self-censorship.”
Bensedrine, who has been politically active since the Bourguiba era and has survived multiple periods of detention under past authoritarian regimes, says authoritarian control has reached unprecedented levels under Saied. “I had the feeling that, for the current regime, imprisoning people who are considered troublesome has become a kind of royal lettre de cachet: they lock you up and you never get out,” she said. “I felt that I could remain there for a very long time. At a certain point I told myself: ‘No, I cannot accept this any more.’ There was absolutely no reason for me to be in prison.”
As Bensedrine faced prosecution, a wider wave of arrests swept up other leading civil society and media figures, including prominent lawyer and television commentator Sonia Dahmani, and veteran columnist and radio commentator Mourad Zeghidi. In both cases, authorities relied on Decree-Law 54 of 2022, a controversial law the government has repeatedly used to prosecute people accused of spreading “false information” deemed harmful to public security. Their arrests have become emblematic of the government’s growing reliance on the judiciary to silence critical public voices.
Dahmani was released in November 2025 after 18 months in detention, but was again sentenced to two years in prison earlier this week; she has filed an appeal against the new ruling. Zeghidi remains behind bars, facing additional charges including money laundering and corruption that his legal team describe as baseless and politically motivated.
The steady erosion of press freedom in Tunisia is reflected in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which ranks Tunisia 137th out of 180 countries, down seven spots from its 2025 ranking of 129th. “This decline reflects a deeper trend that RSF has been systematically documenting,” Oussama Bouagila, RSF’s regional advocacy officer and deputy bureau chief for North Africa, told Middle East Eye. “RSF recorded 39 prosecutions against journalists based on laws unrelated to journalism. President Saied has repeatedly called on public media to align themselves with what he describes as a war of national liberation.”
Bouagila noted that the 2011 revolution opened an unprecedented era of media freedom in Tunisia, but that progress was abruptly halted after the July 2021 power grab and the subsequent concentration of all political authority in Saied’s hands.
The case of Inkyfada stands as one of the most visible examples of this ongoing crackdown. Widely recognized across Tunisia and the international community for its hard-hitting investigations into Tunisian politics and society—including groundbreaking reporting on abuses targeting the sub-Saharan migrant community after Saied labeled migrants a “demographic threat”—the outlet remains a rare independent space for thousands of Tunisian readers.
Ahead of Inkyfada’s 1 June dissolution hearing, Lassoued emphasized that the outlet has complied fully with all Tunisian regulatory requirements. “Looking ahead to 1 June, let us be clear: we have by no means broken the law or the norms of civil society work in Tunisia. We have done everything by the book, including the consistent declaration of all foreign funding. We expect nothing less than justice,” she said. Lassoued added that the crackdown represents a fundamental shift in the country’s political trajectory: “What we are witnessing in Tunisia is no longer just a shift in attitude; it is a systematic, structural crackdown on independent media and civil society.”