#6: Slow progress, or no progress?
Having finally broken the wall of bureaucratic sabotage, the journalist was ready to engage the institutions. But what if those institutions were simultaneously breaking down?
NOTE: This is a continuation of a previous episode. For full context, please find the previous episodes here. If you’re reading the School of Tunisia for the first time, you can find an introduction to the page here.
Equipped with the newfound knowledge of my travel ban details, I felt like a new person. There was a plan, there was a timeline, and there was hope for a future.
Two separate plans needed to be set in motion - one for the S08 travel ban and one for the S17 ‘border consultation’. The investigation remained without charges and, presumably, evidence (though I did learn later that cops had been snooping around my neighborhood asking about my ‘character’). In that context, the main things to deal with were the travel bans.
The S08 - the judicial travel ban that came from the Sfax Court of First Instance - should be simple enough to get rid of. When the travel ban was issued during my waiting time at the airport on June 25th, 2024, it was legal in accordance with Tunisian law. Of course, one can and should criticize both the law’s wording, lack of legal definition of key terms and application. But it was legal. It was legal from June 25th until July 10th - 15 days. Beyond July 10th, it was indisputably illegal. Therefore, the request to have it removed should naturally result in it being removed without question.
As for the S17, that one was a bit trickier. Since the S17 is an administrative order, not a judicial one, it had to be addressed in the administrative court in an abuse of authority lawsuit. I would have to file a lawsuit against the Ministry of Interior for abuse of authority in the shape of enforcing the S17-order against me. It is an open-shut case because the S17 practice contradicts the Tunisian constitution, Tunisian law and Tunisia’s international obligations. Despite that, such a lawsuit would take a year and a half to reach a verdict.
During this year and a half, our side would prepare a report to submit, which would be sent to the Ministry of Interior. The Ministry would then prepare its own response report to the court, and eventually, there will be a hearing in open court. At the court hearing, I am not obliged to be present, but I have the right to be there with my lawyer. The Ministry has the right to send a representative to the court, but sometimes chooses to not be present.
10-15 days after filing the abuse of authority lawsuit - once it had made its way into the court system properly - I would submit a ‘request for suspension of execution’ to the Administrative Court. That would, if it were approved, obligate the Ministry of Interior to suspend its execution of the S17 ‘border consultation’ until a verdict had been reached in the abuse of authority case.
The request for suspension of execution would take about a month to process, and its outcome would be dependent on me making a strong case for why I would need to travel before the main lawsuit had seen a verdict. I needed to explain my lack of bank card, and it would also help my case if I had family-related reasons to travel.
At the time, I figured that it would be possible for me to leave Tunisia by mid-fall at the latest. I sent all the updates in an email to the embassy team.
This was a relief. Life was getting hard in a lot of ways, and while I was feeling happy that a way forward had appeared, the situation remained suboptimal, to say the least.
It still felt like the police were breathing down my neck everywhere I went. And with the loss of access to my bank accounts, I also lost all sense of independence. My girlfriend had to shoulder everything financially - including legal fees. The combination of depression-induced laziness and complete financial dependence made me feel like a failure, which compounded the depression.
In terms of my situation vis-à-vis the authorities, it felt like I had somehow managed to break through the walls of bureaucratic sabotage they had set up. How would they react to that? Would my situation intensify? Would they start rushing to make a case against me? These were the types of questions going through my head at the end of August.
One theory was that they were attempting to keep me preoccupied through the Tunisian presidential elections on October 6th. Who knows?
On August 31st, 2024, I met with my lawyer and talked through it all: the ways to handle the different aspects of my situation, the current state of things, and what had happened while I was waiting in the airport. As for the current state of things, the case was a ‘preliminary investigation’, which means no charges had been filed yet. There is no legal limit to how long a ‘preliminary investigation’ can last, and my phone would not be returned until it had been closed.
As we know, the request to have the S08 judicial travel ban lifted had already been submitted. Of course, there is no such thing as active communication from the court. We would have to show up in-person at the court to check if the ban had been lifted. If it had not been lifted, we’d have to return again another time. And another time. Each time would entail a three-hour drive each way from Tunis to Sfax and thus take an entire day out of my lawyer’s calendar.
As for the abuse of authority-lawsuit, Anas would file it the following Tuesday, September 3rd.
Reaching for support
On September 10th, I got a WhatsApp message from the Danish ambassador, Katrine. She reached out to confirm the exact dates for the embassy team’s visit to Tunisia, including meetings at the Tunisian Foreign Ministry, in late September. For the meetings, it was important that they were able to reference all parts of my case with precision, so I offered to provide the various case numbers.
It took a few more days to gather the numbers, but I was able to send them to Katrine on September 13th. The numbers included the case number with the public prosecution, the investigation report number from the Judicial Police in Sfax, and the investigation report number from the First Central Unit for Investigations with the National Guard in Laouina. With them in hand, it would be a simple task to reference the exact case in meetings with the Foreign Ministry, and it would be easy for the ministry to gather information after the meeting to send to the Danes.
A few days later, we also settled on a date during their visit for me to meet with an embassy staffer who was also on the trip.
Meanwhile, I was put in touch with Human Rights Watch (HRW) by a journalist friend. They have researchers working on the ground in Tunisia, and after a week or so of back and forth, I got in touch with one of them. I had previously attempted to reach out to the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) with an email on July 2nd because I was told they do work on arbitrary detainment and S17-cases in Tunisia, but they never responded. To be fair, I also did not give them much detail, since I was afraid that my emails were being read elsewhere.
My meeting with an HRW researcher, then, became my first successful attempt at seeking out (non-governmental) institutional support.
My purpose was two-fold. On the one hand, I wanted to make sure that someone with the capability to run a serious campaign had all the relevant information about my case if things went south. On the other hand, I wanted to gauge their reaction to my story. No one I had talked to so far - fellow journalists, various local activists, the Danes etc. - had heard of any cases like mine where a foreign journalist was refused their right to travel. So to my knowledge, my case represented a serious escalation in terms of how far the Tunisian authorities were willing to go to cover themselves on the migration issues.
Perhaps it’s not shocking, given that it has since been documented that the authorities systematically sell migrants to militias in Libya. Both sides, of course, are payrolled by the EU.
But anyways. I wanted to gauge from the HRW researcher, who presumably would have the finger on the pulse regarding these things, if my case was in fact as unprecedented as it seemed.
I met with the researcher on September 19th in a café in central Tunis. Like myself, they were surprised at how far it went. I told them the whole story up until that point, and while they were not surprised that I had been arrested initially, the fact that things didn’t end at that were surprising and seemingly, to the researcher, signaled a sense of worsening conditions for foreign journalists in the country.
The HRW researcher suggested I get in touch with the North African Foreign Correspondents Club (NAFCC) - a legally registered association in Tunisia that connects foreign correspondents in the country. It is my impression that they used to have a decent amount of access to Tunisian authorities and held roundtable discussions with officials that helped journalists connect. But I believe much of that has run dry.
Either way, I had wanted to be a member of the association since moving to Tunis. However, the membership form asked for three recent journalistic publications, and I was working on my third one when I was arrested. The HRW researcher led me to believe that that requirement was more flexible than I had assumed.
I had also spoken with a prominent member of the association about a week after my initial arrest who scolded me over the phone for “bringing a Tunisian friend” to a risky reporting situation. Of course, Wifak was not just a “friend” in the context, but I did not know if anyone was listening in on the call, so I was afraid to give the full context. This discouraged me from interacting with the association further.
At this point, I was also unsure if becoming a member of the association would help me in any way. I ended up communicating a bit back and forth with the head of the association about my case anyway. I figured I had nothing to lose. Also, while the collective body of foreign journalists in Tunisia had definitely heard about my case at this point and stopped doing work on migration in Sfax because of it (other than an undercover operation that resulted in an anonymously published piece in The Guardian), it was only fair for them to have some information directly from me.
Strategizing with the embassy
The following week - the week of September 23rd - was an eventful one. The team from the Danish embassy was coming to Tunis. They would have meetings in the Tunisian Foreign Ministry about my case on that Wednesday, and I was set to meet with them on that Friday. My lawyer would check at the Administrative Court on that Thursday to confirm that the abuse of authority lawsuit had successfully entered their systems and then submit my request for suspension of execution. The following week, he planned to head to Sfax to check if the court had lifted the S08 judicial travel ban.
Before their meeting, a staffer at the Embassy reached out to me, and we spoke a bit. Their meeting would be that afternoon in the consular section of the Foreign Ministry, but upon their arrival, they had consulted different friendly embassies to see if anyone had dealt with a similar case to mine. None had. However, one embassy asked the Danes why they didn’t just ask the Tunisians to deport me.
Of course, I had been rejecting that idea all along, being that I had a life in Tunisia that I wanted to maintain and a name I wanted to keep clean. But they wanted to confirm one last time that we were working toward solving the situation - not getting me out as fast as possible, regardless of the price.
In that case, the Danes told me, the best strategy would probably be to tell the Tunisians that this is a Danish citizen who cannot seem to access information about his case and is very concerned about it, mention the various notes verbales that had gone unanswered and leverage the fact that Denmark is opening an embassy in Tunisia in 2025.
I suggested to also emphasize the question of media freedom and the fact that I am a journalist, but they believed emphasizing the embassy opening would be more effective.
I was not really sure how much and why the Tunisians would care about that. I read it as a strategic choice that remained consistent throughout the process, that the Danes preferred to pressure the Tunisians from a positive place rather than from a demanding or threatening place. Both my family and my girlfriend were very critical of this approach because they felt like the Danes were prioritizing their bilateral relationship over me (primarily for the sake of migration cooperation), but I was not sure.
Maybe they were prioritizing the bilateral relationship over me, or maybe their choice to not engage with hostility was indeed the most productive. Maybe it was a mix of the two. I’m no diplomat, so I chose to go with their recommendations without questioning the approach too much.
After the meeting, the Danes reached out again. The meeting was positive, and the consular representative in the Foreign Ministry had been nice. He had asked about the legality of my stay, my motives for being in Tunisia, and how long I had been there. I gave that information to the Danes, and they would forward it in a note after returning to Algiers. The responsible person in the ministry also promised to look into the case.
On Friday that week, I met with the embassy staffer, and we got a chance to speak in more detail about their meeting at the ministry two days prior. Their contact person at the Foreign Ministry seemed genuine and easy to talk to, even about some of the more difficult topics, I was told.
Of course, knowing how the Ministry of Interior monopolizes power in Tunisia - and knowing that that monopolization process is turbocharged at the moment - I suspected that the real challenge would not be to get a Ministry of Foreign Affairs employee to commit his efforts to figuring out my case. Rather, it would be for that person to gain information from the Ministry of Interior. At the time as well as now, I strongly believe that if the Ministry of Interior did not want to share information on my case, no other ministry would get anywhere near getting it.
In conclusion, the plan would be to make sure the Ministry of Interior knew they were being watched. I’m not convinced that had any influence on my case at this point, but it was what we could do.
Election day
More days passed. My lawyer meant to go to Sfax on October 2nd to check the status on the S08 judicial travel ban, but personal matters prevented him from going.
The Tunisian presidential elections were coming up on October 6th, and as conspiratorial as it may sound, I suspected there was a chance that my situation would ease up and be solved after the elections. Maybe it seems crazy. But it was difficult to find any other logical explanation. So in the absence of a better explanation, this one began to seem reasonable.
My mind was also shifting in a negative direction again. The glimmer of hope from late August had been replaced with another depression dive. This time, however, there was more anger. I wanted the people who were doing this to me to pay. I felt a deep sense of injustice: Everyone from the crooked cop to the crooked judge, from my editor at the New Arab to editors and journalists at various top publications I had reached out to as a lifeline in August’s desperation, were taking advantage of my situation to further their own careers. And I was too powerless to respond to any of it.
I contemplated if I was living life incorrectly. From my perspective, it looked like the only way to get anywhere in life was to treat others like shit, and that’s just not how I live my life. Was I supposed to give in? Supposed to be selfish and join the world’s evil?
In hindsight, I wonder if part of the reason why I believed the theory that I’d be let go after the election was that I needed something, anything, to hold on to.
Election day came on Sunday, October 6th. To Tunisians, that meant little. The elections were heavily repressed in unusually obvious ways, and everyone knew who was going to win the presidency. To me, however, the shape of that repression felt consequential.
The Administrative Court had rejected a decision by the Tunisian Independent High Electoral Body (ISIE) to exclude three candidates from running, despite them living up to the relevant conditions. The ISIE refused to implement the court’s decision, and after much conflict over the question, the Tunisian parliament changed the election law a week before the election to strip the court of jurisdiction over electoral matters.
Since Tunisia failed to ever elect a constitutional court, the Administrative Court has for years been the highest court in Tunisia, and had been seen as truly independent until then. But in these election days, it seemed that the government sought to end that independence and gain control over the court.
Unfortunately, this was the court I had put my faith in to end my S17 ‘border consultation’.
To me, the situation with the court emblematized a larger dynamic that was present, and of which I was really scared. It felt like the Tunisia whose institutions I chose to put my faith in in May and June was rapidly dissolving. I still wonder if what was an open-shut abuse of authority lawsuit when I filed it in September will still be winnable in a year when the court reaches a verdict.
In fact, I wonder if the Administrative Court will even be functional by then.
Being caught in circumstances like these - where the rules of the game were changing while I was playing it - made me really scared. I wanted to get out, and if things were not to be solved immediately after the elections, I was beginning to consider what other options I might have.
In the next episode of the School of Tunisia, the waiting game continues. The court in Sfax offers little in the way of lifting the indisputably illegal travel ban, and diplomatic pressure seemingly continues to fail. Meanwhile, a French PhD researcher is imprisoned in Tunisia, causing new levels of fear. I begin to contemplate riskier methods…
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