Calls in Tunisia to publish the report of the Transitional Justice Authority in the Official Gazette

Non-governmental organizations on Tuesday called on the Tunisian authorities to publish the report of the "Truth and Dignity Commission" charged with transitional justice in the Official Gazette (the official pioneer) about a year after it was issued by the commission.

The final report of the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission charged with examining the files of the victims of the dictatorship showed political and media responsibility, some of whom are still active, for human rights abuses.

The Civil Coalition "No Back", and both the "Compass" organization, the "Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights" and "Lawyers without Borders" organized a national conference on Tuesday in the capital Tunis on "completing the transitional justice path" in order to shed light on the challenges hindering the current path .

The Truth and Dignity Commission, which was created in 2014 and charged with the transitional justice file in the country and completed its work at the end of 2018, published its report, which is in hundreds of pages, in March 2019, despite the pressures and difficulties in carrying out its tasks.

The "No Back" coalition said that the report was not published until today in the official pioneer (the official newspaper) of the Tunisian Republic, and this omission has no legal justification, rather it is a breach of the law that appears on the face of hostility towards the transitional justice course.

Transitional Justice Law
Tunisia's Transitional Justice Law requires - in Chapter 67 - the authorities to publish the report in the Official Gazette.

In his intervention at the conference, Belhassen Bin Omar, the presidential advisor, said that the government had received the report, and that there was a committee that had almost finished its work to publish it.

Antonio Managanella, director of the "Lawyers Without Borders" office in Tunisia considered that publishing the report in the official newspaper constituted a commitment by the state to implement it as stipulated in that law.

The organization that listened to tens of thousands of witnesses in recent years, some of them public and others secret, included in its report abuses and violations committed by political systems from 1955 until after the Tunisian revolution, specifically until the end of 2013.

The commission organized public hearings since 2016 in which it gave the floor to the victims of the system to present their testimonies to the public.

Thirteen specialized transitional justice tribunals have been established, and since the end of last May, they have examined cases where sufficient evidence of violations has been collected, and no judicial rulings have been issued to date.