5/10/2017 Tunisia: Spate of Prosecutions for Free Speech | Human Rights Watch The UN Human Rights Committee has said that it is us continue to ght human rights abuses. Please give now to support our work » essential not toHelp subject comment on public issues to censorship or restraint, that all public figures are legitimately subject to public criticism, and that there should be no prohibition on criticism of public institutions. Further, defamation should in principle be treated as a civil, not a criminal, issue and never punished with a prison term. × On September 1, Zarrouk, a former prisons officer and member of the Union for a Republican Police, wrote a Facebook post criticizing the general prosecutor of the Tunis Tribunal, Tarek Chkioua, alleging that his prosecutorial policy was “politicized.” Zarrouk wrote that Chkioua was violating “the rule of law, supremacy of the values of truth, justice, and equity and equality between citizens,” and alleged that Chkioua had served as the “judicial strong-arm of repression” under the former Tunisian dictator, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Zarrouk also criticized Noureddine Bhiri, the former justice minister, for reappointing Chkioua. The Facebook post included personal attacks against Bhiri and Chkioua. The investigative judge of the fourth bureau of the First Instance Tribunal of Tunis charged Zarrouk on September 9 with “accusing, without proof, a public agent of violating the law” and “defamation of public officials” under penal code articles 128 and 245; distributing information “likely to harm public order” under press code article 54; and “disrupting lives through public communication networks” under article 86 of the telecommunication law, his lawyer, Charfeddine Kellil, told Human Rights Watch. On September 9, al-Jiss, a journalist at Express FM radio, received a summons to appear as an accused before the investigative judge of the 14th Bureau of the https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/09/13/tunisia-spate-prosecutions-free-speech 2/9