A year ago, for the first time in the Arab world since independence, popular uprisings toppled authoritarian regimes that were thought to be invincible.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN) is following the Tunisian uprising with great attention and enthusiasm, and commends the Tunisian people for their historical startle that shook the nation on the 14th of January last year. This revolution sparked off the Arab spring, which spread throughout the region and put the debate on democracy and human rights on the agenda of government programmes.
The EMHRN welcomes the fact that the recently held elections were fair, transparent and consistent with the principles and the practices of a regained democracy.
However, the EMHRN notes that the reforms already undertaken, while initiating the beginning of the transition process, have failed to restore a genuine rule of law fulfilling the aspirations of the majority of the Tunisian people, in particular women and youth.
The EMHRN detects no improvement in the economic and social situation of Tunisia’s very poor, particularly the marginalised interior regions, still faring increasingly high unemployment rates and where current economic policies keep most of the local population in deplorable conditions.
The EMHRN commends the Tunisian people and several institutions on their extraordinary efforts to host the hundreds of thousands of refugees coming from Libya when Europe declined -as it still does- to guest tens of thousands of Tunisian migrants in a dignified way.
It points out that the European Union should bear the responsibility of providing Tunisia with necessary economic aid to ensure that the hopes of the revolution are not dashed.
Having just opened its Tunis mission, in support of its members and Tunisian civil society organisations, the EMHRN is calling on the Constituent Assembly to establish permanent dialogue with all stakeholders of the Tunisian civil society, and to stick to the following principles:
- To set up both institutions and tools needed to bring about transitional justice, inspired by other international experiences in order to prevent from impunity, compensate the victims for their moral and material losses and establish the basis of a truly democratic society;
- To abolish the death penalty;
- To ensure the pre-eminence of international treaties over domestic law upon their ratification by the Parliament in the framework of the future constitution;
- To ensure respect for women’s rights through the ratification of all international conventions and consequent protocols and by designing national jurisdiction in accordance with these conventions;
- To ratify all the conventions in force pertaining to civil and political freedoms and economic, social and cultural rights and to adapt national jurisdiction accordingly;
- To state in the Constitution the principle of the independence of the judiciary, including prosecution, and define the rules that ensure this independence along with free exercise of the rights of the defence;
- To provide absolute freedom of conscience a constitutional value and to scrupulously respect freedom of association and freedom of speech, in particular;
- To define the effective modalities by which public servants can be held responsible before common law jurisdictions.
- To adopt a general framework that provides respect for the economic, social and cultural rights as defined by International Conventions and to set up a system of equitable development between the regions;
- To integrate human rights into all levels of teaching: primary, secondary and higher education, in close cooperation with civil society;
- To establish a legal status for refugees in conformity with International Conventions, to stop criminalizing migrants and to renegotiate past agreements made with the EU Member States on this subject.