Tunisians, who are also victims of torture, protest during a ceremony to unveil the Truth and Dignity Commission on June 9, 2014, in the capital Tunis. (Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty images)[/caption]Tunisia’s new Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC), launched this month, faces a complex and heavy workload. Its task is to investigate human rights abuses and corruption since 1955, later arbitrating compensation awards, vetting civil service appointments, and recommending reforms to avoid repetition of past abuses.
Under the framework of the transitional justice law adopted last December that outlines its work, the duty of the new commission is also to preserve and document a “collective memory” of past abuses, and advocate measures to achieve “national reconciliation.”
But the TDC’s combination of functions “may prove challenging,” warned Pablo De Greiff, the Colombian human rights activist who as a United Nations special rapporteur has been advising the Tunisians on transitional justice.
Headed by veteran human rights activist and former journalist Sihem Bensedrine, the TDC has four years from this month to look into rights abuses by the Tunisian state over the past six decades— essentially since independence. Its fifteen members, who include lawyers and representatives of human rights NGOs, are to hear evidence from victims and other witnesses in sessions that may in some cases be held publicly.
Taking on staff seconded from ministries or elsewhere, the commission will request access to official archives, and if necessary order searches to secure relevant records. The most serious cases will be sent to the courts for prosecution.
The assumption is that to build a solid democracy, all the unpleasant truths of the previous repressive era need to be brought out into the full light of day, with or without formal prosecutions. Since the 2011 uprising against the regime of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, this has been happening in a haphazard manner that has left public opinion confused and unsatisfied. In the months following the uprising there was some spontaneous media coverage of former victims speaking out about their experiences as detainees, for example. But with the country far from stable, and much of the media still in the same hands as before the revolution, caution soon set in.
A commission in 2011 tasked with looking into how police shot dead protesters during 2010–2011 left the public none the wiser as to who gave the orders to shoot. A report produced by an anti-corruption commission in late 2011 was similarly unsatisfactory—the rather arbitrary selection of cases it chose to highlight was judged by some observers to have reflected political expediency rather than neutral fact-finding.
Nor has the judicial system—only now learning how to operate independently—given much more satisfaction. Brief trials of Ben Ali, in absentia in 2011 and 2012, were unconvincing. Military court hearings of charges related to the shooting of demonstrators sometimes seemed to be opportunities for grandstanding by lawyers rather than exercises in serious fact-finding. Relatives of young ‘martyrs of the revolution,’ who had traveled up to the courtroom from the provinces, were sometimes left with mute disappointment on their faces.
Now under the framework law, specialized judicial chambers will be set up and staffed by judges trained for the task by experts in transitional justice. These chambers will hear cases of gross human rights violations, including deliberate killings, rape and torture. They will also adjudicate over cases of financial corruption that may be referred to them by the TDC.
But the TDC’s anti-corruption function is not spelled out clearly. A subcommittee will consider applications from those facing corruption lawsuits for possible out-of-court settlements, in which offenders will be expected to acknowledge guilt and offer a “clear apology.”
The implication is that major Tunisian businesses may be able to extricate themselves from lawsuits by paying back funds deemed to represent profits from corruption. Such was the spread of mafia-like rackets in the closing years of the Ben Ali regime that uncertainty over who will or will not be prosecuted has been a drag on investment.
Speaking at an event marking the installation of the TDC last week on Monday, June 9, De Greiff warned that a certain “fragmentation” into different categories of victims was already a risk. This needed to be urgently addressed to avoid any “sense of victims competing with each other,” he said.
He was referring to the tendency for some in Tunisia to see transitional justice as a ‘zero-sum’ affair, in which attention given to recent victims of repression under Ben Ali—predominantly members or sympathizers of the Islamist party Ennahda—somehow detracts from the suffering of secular-minded leftists victimized under the first post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba.
The fifteen commission members were selected after wide consultations with Tunisian NGOs “without exclusion,” Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa emphasized at the launch ceremony. An alignment of human rights NGOs and lawyers allege that the TDC’s nominally independent members include several who are too close to members of Ennahda. These critics argue that commission president Bensedrine falls into this category—despite her background as a secular-minded leftist. Ennahda, meanwhile, is now no longer the party of government, having ceded power to Jomaa’s non-party cabinet last January.
The worst-case scenario would be for Tunisia’s process of transitional justice to be seen through the prism of political rivalry between Islamists and secularists, leaving the wider public “lost in translation,” as one observer put it last week, as to the relevance of this whole process to their own lives.
The framework law stipulates that for the first six months the TDC will busy itself with preparations, including drawing up its own rules of operation. Long anticipated legislative and presidential elections are expected to be held by the end of 2014. The commission will therefore begin its core work in a changed political landscape, and in one in which critics of the TDC, and of the legislation that set it up, may feel emboldened.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
