{"id":29320,"date":"2025-05-03T09:14:38","date_gmt":"2025-05-03T13:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=29320"},"modified":"2025-05-03T09:14:38","modified_gmt":"2025-05-03T13:14:38","slug":"tunisia-jails-ex-prime-minister-on-terrorism-charges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2025\/05\/03\/tunisia-jails-ex-prime-minister-on-terrorism-charges\/","title":{"rendered":"Tunisia jails ex-prime minister on terrorism charges"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

A court in Tunisia has sentenced former Prime Minister Ali Laarayedh to 34 years in prison on a raft of terrorism charges.<\/b><\/p>\n

He is the latest high-profile critic of the president to be jailed as campaigners slam “sham trials” in the country.<\/p>\n

The 69-year-old is a prominent opponent of President Kais Saied and leader of Ennadha, a moderate Islamist party that holds the largest representation in parliament.<\/p>\n

Along with seven other people, Laarayedh was charged with setting up a terrorist cell and helping young Tunisians travel abroad to join Islamist fighters in Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

“I am not a criminal… I am a victim in this case,” he wrote in a letter to the court’s prosecutor last month, according to the AFP news agency.<\/p>\n

He was sentenced on Friday.<\/p>\n

Laarayedh has consistently denied any wrongdoing and said the case was politically motivated.<\/p>\n

In recent weeks,\u00a0at least 40 critics of Tunisia’s president have been sent to prison<\/a>\u00a0– including diplomats, lawyers and journalists.<\/p>\n

Rights groups say these trials have highlighted Saied’s authoritarian control over the judiciary, after dissolving parliament in 2021 and ruling by decree.<\/p>\n

Since he was first elected six years ago, the former law professor has rewritten the constitution to enhance his powers.<\/p>\n

Laarayedh was arrested three years ago and campaigners had called for his release – including Human Rights Watch<\/a>, who said the affair seemed like “one more example of President Saied’s authorities trying to silence leaders of the Ennahda party and other opponents by tarring them as terrorists”.<\/p>\n

Ennahdha governed the North African nation for a short while after a popular uprising dubbed the Arab Spring.<\/p>\n

The protest movement originated in Tunisia – where a vegetable-seller called Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself in despair of government corruption – and mass demonstrations soon spread across the wider region in 2011.<\/p>\n

However many Tunisians say the democratic gains made have since been lost, pointing to the current president’s authoritarian grip on power.<\/p>\n

Yet President Saied has rejected criticism from inside and outside the country, saying he is fighting “traitors” and suffering “blatant foreign interference”.<\/p>\n

Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A court in Tunisia has sentenced former Prime Minister Ali Laarayedh to 34 years in prison on a raft of terrorism charges. He is the latest high-profile critic of the president to be jailed as […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,2,6],"tags":[11248,1791,2761,1097,23,2322],"class_list":{"0":"post-29320","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-human-rights","8":"category-news","9":"category-world","10":"tag-ennadha","11":"tag-human-rights-watch","12":"tag-iraq","13":"tag-syria","14":"tag-terrorism","15":"tag-tunisia","16":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29320"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29322,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29320\/revisions\/29322"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}