Press Release
To the Head and Members of National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT)
Subject: Notification of Arbitrary Arrests
(Translated)

Greetings to your esteemed office,

We would like to inform you that the Shabab of Hizb ut Tahrir in Wilayah Tunisia have been consistently subjected to a campaign of arbitrary arrests and court referrals without legal justification since President Essebsi stated on September 1, 2016, "il faut trouver une solution avec Hizb Ettahrir" (A solution must be found with Hizb ut Tahrir) during his meeting with the National Security Council. Since that date and up to the present time, hardly a week goes by without our central and local offices recording arbitrary arrests of Hizb’s activists, sometimes extending more than two weeks, and once they are referred to the judiciary, the charges against them are often dropped.

Furthermore, the defense team has documented several legal violations, including:

First, violation of their personal privacy through the confiscation of their mobile phones and forcibly obtaining passwords, followed by browsing their personal pages and creating case files and charges related to terrorism suspicions and glorification based on their posts or their official affiliations with Hizb ut Tahrir and its official stances.

Given that there is no dispute that what a person writes and records in their posts and videos on social media are their own personal thoughts, accessing these without permission constitutes a violation of their personal privacy.

Second, Article 5 of Decree No. 87 of 2011, which regulates political parties, prohibits the public authorities from obstructing the activities of political parties.

Third, the recent arrests have also affected the journalist Ahmed Ben Fatiha, who has been detained without legal justification since September 19th of last year up to the date of writing these lines.

Fourth, Hizb ut Tahrir has been prevented without legal justification or basis from engaging in any public activities, despite its compliance with all applicable legal regulations.

Therefore, while we observe your automatic monitoring of all human rights violations occurring in Tunisia before and after July 25th, and we are aware that you are well-informed about everything that the Hizb and its Shabab have been subjected to, whether by the authorities or the orphans of the former Democratic Constitutional Rally, and you have remained inactive, we remind you, through this letter, of your fundamental role that The National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists is based on.

We urge you to refrain from using multiple and diverse measures in defending Journalists and media professionals’ rights according to exclusionary and extremist intellectual and ideological criteria.

Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir in Wilayah Tunisia