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Taoufik Ben Brik (born 1960 in Jerissa) is a Tunisian journalist.
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Taoufik Ben Brik (born 1960 in Jerissa) is a Tunisian journalist.
Brik is a prominent critic of the former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and an outspoken critic of censorship in the Middle East. He has published numerous articles, and collections of articles as books, abroad that describe the difficult economic conditions in the country, political corruption, and lack of free speech. In 2000, he was accused of publishing false information and other spurious charges, [1] and went on a hunger strike in protest. [2] He has been periodically detained in Tunisia and prevented from travelling, and his family has also been harassed as a way to intimidate him and prevent him from speaking out against the regime. [3]
He was incarcerated on October 29, 2009 on trumped-up charges of assaulting a citizen after a traffic incident. The Court of Appeal upheld a sentence of nine years on 3 January 2010 in a trial that "confirmed the complete absence of independence of the Tunisian legal system" according to the defendant's French lawyer, William Bourdon. [4]
On April 27, 2010, he was released from prison after serving 6 months. [5] [6] He attended World Press Freedom Day in Paris on May 3, 2010, at the Reporters Without Borders offices and told journalists that he would stand for the presidency of Tunisia in 2014, explaining that President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali would be past the age set in the Constitution of Tunisia. [7] After the 2011 Tunisian Revolution which ousted Ben Ali, Ben Brik declared his candidacy in the upcoming 2011 Tunisian presidential election. [8]
His books include:
Taoufik Ben Brik has received several awards: the Grand Prize of the Association of Tunisian Journalists (AJT) for Best Journalistic Work (1989), the AJT Human Rights Award (1990), the CREDIF Award (1991), the UNDP Award (1992), the Dashiell-Hammett and Lillian-Hellman Awards, the Human Rights Watch Award, and the El Khabar Omar-Ourtilène International Award (2000). [9]
In 2012, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2018, he received the highest distinction from the Tunisian General Labor Union. [9]
The politics of Tunisia takes place within the framework of a unitary semi-presidential representative democratic republic, with a president serving as head of state, prime minister as head of government, a unicameral legislature and a court system influenced by French civil law. Between 1956 and 2011, Tunisia operated as a de facto one-party state, with politics dominated by the secular Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) under former presidents Habib Bourguiba and then Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. However, in 2011 a national uprising led to the ousting of Ben Ali and the dismantling of the RCD, paving the way for a multi-party democracy. October 2014 saw the first democratic parliamentary elections since the 2011 revolution, resulting in a win by the secularist Nidaa Tounes party with 85 seats in the 217-member assembly.
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, commonly known as Ben Ali or Ezzine, was a Tunisian politician who served as the second president of Tunisia from 1987 to 2011. In that year, during the Tunisian revolution, he was overthrown and fled to Saudi Arabia.
Internet censorship in Tunisia decreased in January 2011 following the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The successor acting government removed filters on social networking sites such as YouTube.
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Socialism in Tunisia or Tunisian socialism is a political philosophy that is shared by various political parties of the country. It has played a role in the country's history from the time of the Tunisian independence movement against France up through the Tunisian Revolution to the present day.
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The National Council for Liberties in Tunisia is a Tunisian NGO that specializes in human rights.
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