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Preparatory session for the conference on rights, freedoms, and for a fair democratic republic
Opening speech by the president of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights
Mr. Abderrahman Hedhili
Dear ladies and gentlemen.
Freedom and justice activists from all fronts, warm greetings.
We have succeeded in organizing this preparatory session in response to the attack on our initiatives since the first hours of their announcement. After a few days, this attack shifted to target the League and its president, to whom we renew our full solidarity. We only see this attack as a sign of the ruling system’s anxiety and fear of serious national initiatives that challenge tyranny.
The days since our initiative was made public have been difficult and rich in intense lessons, because they have enabled us to make a clear distinction between what we represent, we who are here today in this hall and many others, as a democratic and human rights movement that has not and will not surrender to threats and pressure in defending rights, freedom, and justice , and what is represented by those who target us from the partisan and media circles that support tyranny, who remain silent about human rights violations, and advocate for autocratic rule. They even gloat shamelessly at times over the victims of oppression, reveling in their suffering. The importance of this distinction lies in drawing a line between us, who believe in freedom, rights, and a democratic republic, and those who defend tyranny and justify its oppression, despotism, and failure.
Our call for a national conference, as stated in our first appeal, came after the situation had reached its limit and after the farcical trial known as the conspiracy case and the unjust verdicts that resulted from it, and then the arrest of the lawyer and activist judge Ahmed Souab, who shook the authoritarian regime to its core and exposed its true nature. .
However, this call, in essence, even if it comes today, is the culmination of a national role that we did not abandon in the forum and the league before July 25 and after. We warned on several occasions of the danger of the regime’s drift towards absolute individual rule, which was clearly embodied in Decree 117, then the 2022 Constitution and the referendum that was ratified and boycotted by the majority of voters, followed by the parliamentary elections that were rejected by most political forces and lacked the elements of integrity, pluralism and competition between programs. We contributed from a position of historical responsibility and from advanced and active positions in the dialogue initiative called for by the Tunisian General Labor Union, but it never saw light.
The decline, weakness, and fragmentation of civil society, along with the absence of a unifying vision and a clear roadmap, have contributed to the ruling authority’s increased encroachment and tightening of its security and judicial grip on society. The situation will not change as long as the current equation persists.
The 2024 presidential elections were a political setback that took us back to a bygone era that the revolution had sought to end. The elections lacked the most basic conditions for fairness and transparency and turned into a 90 percent endorsement of the current president after he refused to engage in real competition with candidates who wanted to challenge him. The appointed electoral commission refused to implement the administrative court’s decision to reinstate three candidates to the race. In addition, the courts took it upon themselves to remove candidate Ayachi Zamal from the competition by imprisoning him and depriving him of his election campaign. He remains unjustly behind bars to this day. This is in addition to the loyalist parliament’s amendment of the electoral law and the transfer of electoral disputes to the Court of Appeal instead of the Administrative Court a few days before the vote, which is a dangerous precedent that demonstrates the degree of disregard for institutions and the law.
What we conclude today is that all the indicators of authoritarian deviation of the ruling regime have come together. Over the years following July 25, the justice system has been transformed into a tool for suppressing all opposition and free voices, including politicians, civil society activists, journalists, and trade unionists, especially after the decision to dismiss judges and pressure through appointments and the failure to establish an elected Supreme Judicial Council and a Constitutional Court. This has created a stifling climate for freedoms and a state of fear and caution that has spread throughout civil society, the elites, and the general public, causing state legislative institutions to lose their independence and even government structures to lose their prestige.
Free and bold voices have faded within parliament and even in the media, which we lost as a free space after 2011. It has become persecuted and besieged, whether by Decree 54 or under the pressure of instructions and censorship. It gradually lost its role in conveying an honest picture of reality and in organizing the circulation of free and diverse ideas and alternatives. It became dominated by incitement, demonization, and superficiality. Some media platforms turned into tools for spreading discourse of betrayal, violence, and hatred among Tunisians.
Today, many groups are increasingly convinced that the current closed system of government, which rejects dialogue and acknowledgment of the crisis, cannot provide a roadmap for reconciliation or a way out of the suffocating crisis in which the country finds itself and which may quickly deepen in a tense regional and international context for which our country is not prepared.
Although we no longer pin our hopes on political reform from within, we are certain that working to shift the balance of power in favor of democratic change through civil and peaceful means is our only path forward, and one that we must pursue without hesitation.
Dear friends
Supporters of President Kais Saied’s current regime continue to promote him based on his legitimacy as a savior and liberator of the nation and protector of national sovereignty. However, based on the facts, we realize today that these slogans are empty, and that the July 25 regime has destroyed political life, rejected fair democratic elections and peaceful transfer of power, and damaged Tunisia’s image abroad. It is moving towards undermining the foundations of the state as a guarantor of stability and destroying the gains of civil and political society, which date back not only to the post-2011 period but to decades before that. The struggle for human rights, democracy, social justice, trade unionism, student rights, and women’s rights in Tunisia is authentic and deeply rooted. It has not bowed in the past, it does not bow in the present, and it will not bow in the future. Anyone who reads Tunisia’s political history understands that even prisons and torture chambers have reinforced, over generations, the firm conviction that rights are won, not given. Today, we are determined to win our full rights, whatever the cost.
We do not want to remind anyone who we are, what we were, and what we promised ourselves, our consciences, our people, and our friends who are today imprisoned or exiled, or who have been taken away by death. Rather, we will simply say that we are all Ahmed Souab
and we are all Charifa Riahi
and we are all Sonia Dahmani
and we are all Issam Chebbi…
and we are all Rachad Tanboura
and others who have been unjustly imprisoned. In fact, we are all prisoners, whether inside the regime’s prisons or in the big prison that the country has become, and we have decided to break our chains. We will not back down from the struggle we have carved into the soil of our homeland and the memory of our people with our own hands.
We are fully aware that Tunisia is going through a comprehensive and unprecedented crisis that threatens to completely derail the struggle for democracy and disrupts an economy in dire need of new policies that achieve social justice. The current government is responding to the complex structural crisis of the economy with fragmented, propaganda-driven solutions that do not propose radical changes to public economic policies but rather reflect an undeclared submission to the dictates of global neoliberal institutions.
In addition to violations of public and civil rights and freedoms, we now have clear indicators of the severity of the economic and social crisis, which threatens to become dangerous:
With regard to the spread of precarious work: data indicates that the number of workers has reached 3,511,600, of whom 1,630,000 work in the informal sector, representing 46.4%. This is in addition to the continued use of precarious employment mechanisms, the promotion of partial solutions, the failure to respect and implement the promises made by successive governments, and the repression of movements demanding their fulfillment. There is also continued indifference to the suffering and demands of large groups of workers in these sectors, such as agricultural workers, site workers, substitute teachers, the unemployed, PhD holders, and others. In this context, we express our solidarity with the representatives of the staff and executives of the international center for the promotion of disabled people in their struggle and hunger strike to regain their stolen rights. Partial adjustments to certain situations and the abolition of subcontracted labor cannot achieve decent working conditions and decent wages if they are not part of an integrated development vision.
As for inflation and the deterioration of purchasing power: While inflation overall reached 5.7% in February 2025, it reached 7% for foodstuffs. This undermines the right to a decent life, as it directly affects citizens’ ability to secure food and access basic services and contributes to rising poverty rates. All this comes in a context where the country is experiencing repeated disruptions in imports of basic goods and food products, which exacerbates social suffering and deepens inequality and disparities.
With regard to the spread of poverty and deprivation: According to the former Minister of Social Affairs, approximately 4 million Tunisians, representing more than 33% of the population, suffer from deprivation due to a lack of income or loss of employment caused by economic circumstances. Despite the existence of social security programs, free medical care, and low tariffs, these groups remain marginalized and face high prices, shortages of basic foodstuffs, and the deterioration of the public health and transportation sectors. These groups remain in dire need of social and economic integration programs that provide them with decent work and income.
As for social services, we have observed that the state has abandoned its social role:
- The deterioration of public education has gone hand in hand with the expansion and prosperity of private education, the spread of private tutoring, and the rising costs of such services. This is in addition to the collapse of infrastructure, and the tragic disaster that befell Mazouna was merely a sign of this deterioration and the state’s abandonment of its responsibilities.
- The deterioration of public health and its growing lack of health facilities, adequate equipment, human resources in many specialties, and necessary medicines, forcing patients to resort to the private sector, which imposes exorbitant prices for medical services that only the wealthy and the upper middle class can afford.
- Collapse of the public transport sector: This sector suffers from chronic neglect, which has led to a reduction in transport options and a lack of investment in fleet renewal and service improvement. This has resulted, for example, in a decline in the number of buses in Greater Tunis from 1,157 to 350 over the past ten years, as well as a shortage of metro cars due to the lack of renewal of the fleet for more than 15 years and the impossibility of maintaining them.
This is in addition to criminalizing social movements in all their forms and the demands they make, which have long been marginalized. Social movements have undergone a qualitative development, with nearly 2,000 protests taking place by the end of May 2025. The state responded with repression and criminalization. The unjust sentences handed down to young people protesting the environmental situation in Gabes are a clear indication of the authorities’ policy of marginalization and denial.
As for the migration issue:
The February 2023 speech signaled the start of numerous violations affecting refugees, asylum seekers, migrant workers, their families, students from sub-Saharan Africa, and even black Tunisians. A climate of fear prevailed among migrants, forcing sub-Saharan countries to evacuate their nationals, while the rest remained stuck in Tunisia, caught between the danger of returning to their countries of origin and the danger of staying in Tunisia in a climate of agitation and mobilization against them. Hate speech and racism thus moved from being the discourse of groups in cyberspace to state policy.
The Tunisian authorities turned the country into an open prison for migrants and chose, in the first phase, to expel them to the olive woods, deprived of any kind of basic services. Then, in the second phase, they destroyed their primitive tents, scattered them in the open, hunted them down under the trees and in the valleys, and expelled them to the borders and deserts. Women and children were not spared.
We affirm that we are committed to our convictions in word and deed to confront inhumane European policies in the field of migration, from border exportation to proxy guarding and securitization of migration. We reject violations that affect the rights and dignity of Tunisian migrants, such as racism, hatred, and forced deportation, and we reject the same violations that affect migrants in Tunisia .
We also reject policies that criminalize solidarity and stigmatize civil society, and we affirm our solidarity with all detained civil society activists. We stand in solidarity with Charifa Riahi, Saadia Mosbeh, Salwa Ghrissa, Mohamed Jouo, Iyadh Bousalmi, Mostafa Jamali, Abdelrazak Krimi, and Abdallah Said.
Dignity for migrant women and men
Freedom for detained women and men
What we seek today at this conference and at this opening session is not only to raise our voices in anger, but also to set out a necessary path toward national and democratic agreement that will restore hope for saving the state, resuming the process of democratic transition, and guaranteeing citizenship and rights.
We know that what civil society in Tunisia has historically accumulated, especially with the opening up of the public sphere in the last ten years, in terms of experience in struggle, advocacy, mobilization, and proposing alternatives, is under threat but still resisting. We also acknowledge that the political elites who ruled and controlled the political space missed many historic opportunities to break with the past and bring about radical change to the political, economic, and social systems due to the narrow calculations of the various political forces. Tunisians have also come to realize that the goal of assassinations and terrorist plots was, at one point, to undermine the foundations of the nation state and the elements of coexistence and to disrupt the progress of society. We cannot forget or gloss over this entire previous phase with false compromises in order to take decisive steps forward. We must return to it for accountability, evaluation, and criticism that concerns us all, without exception, so that we can resume the path of democracy and secure it from future setbacks.
However, we do not place this legitimate demand and necessary step as an obstacle today to the urgent tasks we are proposing in defense of freedoms and rights and for a just democratic republic.
The rights we believe in are all rights for all people without discrimination based on affiliation, ideology, gender, color, social status, or country. The state we seek to establish is not a state of force that confiscates society, but a state of law based on the justice and supremacy of the law, equality for all before the law, the legitimacy of institutions, and respect for individual rights and public freedoms, which can only be guaranteed by a democratic constitution. A constitution that separates powers and breaks with the concentration of power in the hands of one man.
A just republic is one that does not oppress anyone, does not deny the rights of minorities, and is capable of building a new social contract that restores dignity to all and reduces inequalities.
On this basis, we are organizing this preparatory session and then preparing to organize a second general session in order to achieve clear objectives:
First, providing sufficient conditions for success to build a new space of resistance for forces and dynamics that reject tyranny and seek change with the aim of restoring the democratic path.
Second, launching a field and dialogue dynamic between those who reject autocratic rule and those who wish to transcend it, which means converging efforts and comparing interpretations and contributions in search of a common democratic denominator without compromising diversity and difference.
Third, develop an agreed-upon political roadmap that identifies urgent and medium-term tasks and establishes a framework for monitoring, reviewing, and developing their implementation.
Fourth, link the struggles of civil society and political actors with protest and social movements so that democracy becomes the horizon for all and tyranny does not continue to thrive on the misery of the people.
What we need to achieve these goals is to discuss today freely, openly, and boldly, and to agree and commit together, for we have no choice but to unite against a single adversary: the current ruling system.
