Tunisia Frees Man Sentenced To Death Over Facebook Posts

A Tunisian man has been freed days after he was sentenced to death by a court in the North African country over Facebook posts deemed offensive to President Kais Saied, his lawyer said Tuesday.

The 51-year-old man, Saber Ben Chouchane, had been sentenced on charges including “spreading false news”, defence lawyer Oussama Bouthelja told AFP.

The Paris-based Tunisian human rights group CRLDHT had said the verdict set “a serious precedent” and that Tunisia had “reached unprecedented levels of human rights violations”.

Bouthelja told AFP that overnight from Monday to Tuesday, the man’s “family contacted me and said that he had returned and was at home”.

He said he did not have the details of what had helped free his client — detained in January 2024 — and was waiting to hear more from the courts.

“The last action that I carried out as a lawyer was to file an appeal on Friday,” he said.

The verdict was delivered on Wednesday by a court in Nabeul, east of Tunis, Bouthelja said.

Ben Chouchane was found guilty of “insulting the president, the minister of justice, and the judiciary”, and some of his posts were also deemed to be incitement.

Bouthelja said he had been “shocked, stunned, astonished” by the verdict, adding: “I didn’t believe it at first.”

Tunisian law says “an attack intended to change the state structure or incite residents to attack each other with weapons, causing chaos, murder and robbery on Tunisian soil” is punishable by death.

Tunisian courts continue to issue death sentences, though the country has not carried out executions since 1991.

Saied was elected in 2019 after Tunisia emerged as the only democracy to come out of the Arab Spring.

But in 2021, he staged a sweeping power grab, and human rights groups have since warned of a rollback on freedoms.

Decree 54, the law criminalising “spreading false news”, was enacted by Saied in September 2022.

It has been criticised by rights groups for stifling free speech.

Dozens of Saied’s critics have been prosecuted under Decree 54 and are currently behind bars.

AFP