New urgent fears have been raised over the declining health of 84-year-old imprisoned Tunisian opposition leader Rached Ghannouchi, following an eyewitness account of the politician fainting inside a sweltering Mornaguia prison during an intense national heatwave.
Haifa Chebbi, daughter of jailed Tunisian opposition politician and lawyer Ahmed Chebbi, shared the account in a public Facebook video posted Tuesday. Chebbi explained she observed the incident while visiting her father at the facility, noting that Ghannouchi eventually regained consciousness—but that the episode remains deeply alarming given his advanced age and pre-existing poor health.
Speaking to the stark inequity of her experience versus that of incarcerated people, Chebbi said, “I can’t describe what it feels like to leave prison. I couldn’t breathe.” She placed direct responsibility for Ghannouchi’s failing condition on Tunisian national authorities, adding, “We are all responsible. We are all complicit.”
The alarming incident comes as Tunisia battles an extreme heat event that has pushed temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius in multiple regions. The unrelenting heat has sent demand for air conditioning spiking across the country, straining the national electricity grid and triggering widespread rolling power outages in populated areas. Human rights defenders have long warned that these extreme conditions create a life-threatening hazard for elderly inmates and those with chronic health conditions, especially in Tunisia’s overcrowded prisons, which often suffer from poor ventilation and almost no access to cooling systems.
Ghannouchi, a former speaker of Tunisia’s parliament and leader of the Ennahda Movement, has remained in custody since April 2023. His arrest was part of a sweeping crackdown on political opponents launched by President Kais Saied, who first consolidated unilateral power in July 2021 when he suspended parliament, dismissed the sitting government, and began ruling by executive decree—actions opposition leaders and international observers labeled a coup against Tunisia’s post-2011 democratic transition.
Since Saied’s power grab, dozens of opposition politicians, lawyers, judges, journalists, and civil society activists have been arrested or prosecuted. International human rights organizations have described this campaign as an unprecedented attack on political pluralism and civil liberties in Tunisia. Saied has repeatedly pushed back against these criticisms, claiming Tunisia’s judiciary operates independently and that all detainees face charges for standard criminal violations, not their political beliefs. Critics of the president, however, frame the prosecutions as a deliberate effort to dismantle the independent opposition that emerged after Tunisia’s 2011 democratic revolution.
Ghannouchi has been targeted with a cascade of overlapping prosecutions and convictions that his legal team and supporters uniformly condemn as politically motivated. Since his arrest last year, Tunisian courts have handed down multiple prison sentences in cases ranging from incitement and alleged illegal foreign financing to conspiracy against state security and terrorism-related charges. The Ennahda Movement has consistently rejected all accusations against Ghannouchi as fabricated, arguing the charges are simply a tool to criminalize peaceful political opposition to Saied’s autocratic rule.
Maher Medhioub, a former Tunisian parliamentarian and senior aide to Ghannouchi, sounded an urgent alarm in a public Facebook post following news of the fainting incident. “Time is running out. The risk to his life is becoming increasingly serious,” Medhioub wrote. He added a broad appeal to global leaders, elected lawmakers, legal professionals, journalists, and all human rights advocates: “We call upon world leaders, parliamentarians, legal professionals, journalists, and all defenders of human dignity to give urgent attention to this humanitarian situation and to uphold the principles of justice, human dignity, and the rule of law.”
International human rights bodies have already repeatedly called for Ghannouchi’s release. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded in a 2023 report that Ghannouchi’s imprisonment is arbitrary and demanded his immediate release. Leading global rights groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also joined the criticism, accusing Saied’s government of weaponizing the national judiciary to silence political dissent. Middle East Eye, the original outlet of this reporting, confirmed it contacted Tunisia’s Ministry of Justice for comment on the incident and Ghannouchi’s condition, but received no response prior to publication.