The Worldwide Lawyers Association (WOLAS) condemns the reported decision of the Tunis Court of Appeal of 3 February 2026 to escalate the custodial sentence imposed on Mr Rached Ghannouchi-former Speaker of Tunisia’s elected Assembly and leader of the Ennahda Movement-from 14 years (May 2025) to 20 years’ imprisonment, reportedly without a reasoned justification. Having examined the appellate ruling in full, WOLAS is further compelled to note that the escalation appears not to be accompanied by the kind of reasoned justification that legality requires. The intensification of punishment against an 84-year-old opposition figure detained since April 2023 cannot be treated as routine criminal adjudication. In Tunisia’s current institutional context, it bears the hallmarks of rule by penal law: the repurposing of criminal process as a technique of political neutralisation, in which pluralism is reclassified as ‘security threat’ and opposition is disciplined through exemplary sentencing.
This escalation crystallises a broader constitutional and legal rupture that has unfolded since 25 July 2021 which we examined in detail in our report entitled Human Rights Violations in Tunisia, published in February 2024. In Tunisia, 25 July 2021 marks the time when executive power was consolidated through emergency legality, the elected legislature was effectively dismantled, and constitutional contestation was rendered non-justiciable by the absence of an operational Constitutional Court, despite the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ recommendations. The subsequent remaking of judicial governance-through structural interventions that enable executive influence over judicial careers and disciplinary outcomes-has placed judicial independence under sustained strain. In such conditions, prosecutions of political salience must be assessed not only by statutory labels, but by the integrity of the adjudicative environment in which those labels are deployed.
The proceedings framed as ‘conspiracy against state security’ are particularly susceptible to abuse because ‘state security’ can operate as an elastic category: a floating signifier that converts dissent into danger, and danger into exceptional punishment. WOLAS is gravely concerned by indications that this case architecture relies substantially on anonymous witness testimony and telecommunications metada-forms of evidence that, absent robust safeguards and material corroboration, are structurally incapable of sustaining proof beyond reasonable doubt in a serious conspiracy prosecution. Where witness anonymity prevents meaningful confrontation, and where call-data is treated as a proxy for intent, the criminal process risks collapsing into guilt by association. The reported absence of ordinary corroborative indicia-intercepts, recordings, planning documents, financial trails, weapons, confessions, or other material evidence-heightens concerns that the evidential threshold has been replaced by a security narrative insulated from adversarial testing.
Tunisia’s obligations under international human rights law are binding constraints, not aspirational commitments. The right to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent, and impartial tribunal, the presumption of innocence, equality of arms, effective access to counsel, and the right to examine witnesses are core guarantees-especially in proceedings carrying severe penalties. The reported escalation of sentence without reasons further undermines legality: reasoned judgment is not a formality but a condition of judicial accountability and a safeguard against arbitrariness. WOLAS further notes with concern the continuing disregard of continental judicial oversight following the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ decision of September 2022 concerning measures impairing judicial independence. We urge the African Union, United Nations mechanisms, and Tunisia’s international partners to reject the convenient fiction that these are ordinary criminal matters.
WOLAS therefore calls for (i) immediate publication of a fully reasoned appellate judgment; (ii) effective judicial review before an independent and impartial tribunal, including scrutiny of anonymous-witness reliance and evidential sufficiency; (iii) strict compliance with fair-trial guarantees, including genuine access to counsel and case materials; (iv) an end to securitised prosecutions that criminalise political life through overbroad conspiracy and counter-terror frameworks; and (v) that Mr Rached Ghannouchi, aged 84 and reportedly suffering from serious health conditions, be granted release pending proceedings and be tried at liberty, as required by law and elementary considerations of equity.
