More than a week after 84-year-old jailed Tunisian opposition leader Rached Ghannouchi was reportedly hospitalized following a fainting spell in sweltering prison conditions, his family has been completely cut off from any information about his current state of health and barred from all contact with him, according to his daughter.
Growing anxiety over the Ennahda movement leader’s well-being was sparked after an eyewitness inside Mornaguia Prison confirmed they saw Ghannouchi lose consciousness earlier this month. In an Instagram video statement, Soumaya Ghannouchi, the opposition figure’s daughter, publicly questioned where her father was being held, why authorities are hiding his location, and why all visiting privileges have been revoked.
She detailed that when legal representatives for her father went to the prison to check on him, officials first informed them Ghannouchi had been transferred to a hospital for treatment. But when a lawyer and Ghannouchi’s wife traveled to the medical facility to see him, security and administrative staff turned them away at the gate and refused to release any details about his admission or condition.
“The last update our legal team received was that my father became dizzy and collapsed during a visit, due to severe heat exhaustion,” Soumaya Ghannouchi explained, noting that internal temperatures inside his prison cell have been recorded at over 50 degrees Celsius—levels that pose extreme danger to anyone, particularly an elderly person with pre-existing health conditions.
The elder Ghannouchi lives with Parkinson’s disease and a chronic thyroid disorder, both of which require consistent specialized medical care that his family says he cannot access in current detention conditions. Soumaya Ghannouchi emphasized that holding her father in an uncooled cell during the region’s extreme summer heat amounts to a direct threat to his life, and she has accused Tunisia’s ruling justice system of targeting her father as an act of political retaliation.
She questioned the legitimacy of the multiple convictions that have handed Ghannouchi a cumulative sentence of more than 150 years in prison, plus a life sentence and 10 years of administrative probation, calling the charges “fabricated and absurd” and unbelievable to any reasonable observer.
Rached Ghannouchi, a former speaker of Tunisia’s parliament and the long-serving leader of the country’s largest opposition movement Ennahda, has been behind bars since April 2023. His detention is part of a sweeping crackdown on political opposition figures launched by President Kais Saied, who moved to consolidate autocratic power in July 2021 by suspending parliament, dismissing the sitting government, and ruling by executive decree. Critics of Saied’s power grab have labeled it a coup that derailed Tunisia’s fragile post-Arab Spring democratic transition, and Ghannouchi’s imprisonment has become a defining symbol of the broader crackdown on dissent.
In her statement, Soumaya Ghannouchi demanded immediate access to her father’s full medical records, as well as clear information about the treatment and medication he is currently receiving, noting that access to such information is a fundamental right for any detainee, their family, and legal representation. She also held President Saied and Justice Minister Leila Jaffel directly “morally, politically and legally responsible” for any harm that comes to her father while he remains in detention.