TUNIS, Feb 21 (Reuters) – Rached Ghannouchi, president of Ennahda, Tunisia’s main opposition party, was again summoned before a judge on Tuesday on charges of incitement to violence which he disputes, while the president of the journalists’ union, Mehdi Jlassi, announced that he was the target of a police complaint.
The opposition, the independent press and human rights organizations accuse President Kaïs Saied of seeking to intimidate them to silence the critics who have targeted him since assuming full powers after dissolving parliament in 2021.
Rached Ghannouchi, who chaired Parliament at the time, has since been summoned several times by the courts, the last time on Tuesday by an investigating judge for a case of incitement to violence.
Ennahda, which denounces politically motivated accusations, said it feared that its 81-year-old leader could be arrested, as were several other opponents last week, including leaders of the Islamist party.
According to his lawyer, the complaint relates to a eulogy that Rached Ghannouchi gave last year after the death of a member of his party, in which he said that the latter was not afraid of “tyrants”, a term associated by the police to President Kaïs Saied and presented as incitement to terrorism.
Neither the magistrate nor the police have yet commented on the case.
Meanwhile, the president of the National Union of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT), Mehdi Jlassi, told Reuters that his lawyer had learned that his name was on a list of people who are the subject of another complaint by the police.
The lawyer, he said, became aware of the list while defending activists prosecuted in this case for incitement to disobedience against the police and for acts of violence against police officers during a demonstration last July.
There had been “no attack or clashes with the police” during this rally, said Mehdi Jlassi, contacted by telephone by Reuters. The president of the SNJT has repeatedly denounced the pressure exerted on the independent press by the Tunisian authorities in order to reduce it to silence.
Police and the Interior Ministry declined to comment on the ongoing case. (Report by Tarek Amara, written by Angus McDowall; French version Tangi Salaün, edited by Bertrand Boucey)
©2023 Thomson Reuters, all rights reserved. Reuters content is the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters or its third party content providers. Any copying, republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. “Reuters” and the Reuters Logo are trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies.