Human Rights
Volume 24 Number 2 Spring 1997
Nejib Hosni's Release: An International Legal Campaign
By Neil HicksOn December 14, 1996, less than one year into an eight-year term, Tunisian lawyer Nejib Hosni was released from prison by presidential order. Human rights advocates in the United States, Europe and his colleagues in the Arab human rights movement rejoiced at this news, feeling vindicated in their belief that Hosni was the victim of a wrongful prosecution.
Hosni's Legal Career
The story of Hosni's career is a lesson in professional integrity and courage in the face of severe obstacles. From the early 1990's, when Tunisian President, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's promise of a new Tunisia based on respect for human rights and the rule of law began to turn sour, Hosni was one of a few lawyers who made it their business to defend their fellow citizens facing prosecution for their political opposition to the Ben Ali government. Unlike some, who defended only those whose political views they shared, Hosni defended clients from across the political spectrum, from leftists and communists to alleged supporters of the banned Islamist political party An-Nahda.Hosni quickly gained a reputation as a reliable source of information about human rights violations and political trials. Turner Smith, a partner with the New York firm, Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, met with Hosni in the course of repeated visits to Tunisia as a trial observer on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Smith said of Hosni, "His concerns were not politics, but the rule of law. He neither fabricated nor inflated the reports of persecutions. He allowed the court records to speak for themselves."
Hosni's work reached a new level of prominence in 1992 when he was a key member of the defense team for 279 Islamist sympathizers tried for subversion before a military court. These trials were the climax of the government's political strategy to characterize An-Nahda as a violent, anti-democratic movement operating outside the law. International observers who attended the hearings described the proceedings as unfair, pointing to widespread violations of pre-trial detention procedures, reliance on statements extracted from defendants by use of torture and the fundamental anomaly of civilians being tried by military tribunals.
The Lawyers Committee honored Hosni for his human rights work at its annual Human Rights Awards dinner in New York City in 1992. While in the United States, Hosni spoke publicly of the human rights problems confronting his country and urged U.S. lawyers and government officials to speak out in defense of human rights in Tunisia, exposing a side of Tunisian policy which President Ben Ali's government worked hard to conceal from international attention.
Harassment Escalates
Hosni returned to Tunisia and continued to defend political prisoners, placing himself again in a prominent and difficult position. Among the defendants were a growing number of family members and friends of political activists, brought before courts throughout Tunisia on charges of aiding Ben Ali's political enemies by giving food or money to families where the breadwinner was serving a prison term.As a lawyer involved in political defense work, Hosni was often followed by Tunisia's ubiquitous secret policemen. His correspondence and telephone conversations were interfered with, and his clients and potential clients in commercial cases were urged to take their business elsewhere. Once he came home to find that the municipality had bulldozed part of the wall around his house in preparation for what they said was going to be a new road. The road has never been built. After the initial shock, this treatment did not really surprise him. Other lawyers with whom he worked closely had many stories to share about threats and harassment from the authorities.
In 1994 Hosni acted in the defense of the former president of the Tunisian League for Human Rights, Dr. Moncef Marzouki, who was detained for four months in March after standing as an opponent to President Ben Ali in national presidential elections. Marzouki's candidacy was ruled illegitimate and Ben Ali, the only candidate, won with a reported 99 percent of the vote. Hosni's representation of one of the most outspoken critics of the President still living in Tunisia marked him once again for special attention from the authorities.
The Case Against Hosni
In May 1994, as he was again accompanying a Lawyers Committee trial observer to a political trial, the authorities opened a case against him on charges of falsification of a signature on a 1989 land contract. Two weeks later he was in prison. The charges alleged that Hosni forged the signature of Moncef Rezgui, one of six members of a family who sold land to Hosni in October 1989 for approximately $4,000. Moncef died in October 1990, and his widow, Habiba, claiming that she knew nothing of her husband's decision to sell the land, lodged a criminal complaint against Hosni.The case against Hosni had some fundamental flaws. All of the other members of the Rezgui family contradicted the widow's assertion that Moncef did not intend to sell Most damagingly, one of Moncef's sisters, Fatima, testified that she had accompanied her brother to the municipal offices at Kef where they had signed the contract together. Despite these and other weaknesses in the case, which the Tunisian authorities were never able to explain, the prosecution proceeded.
Hosni was held for 14 months, the maximum period allowed under Tunisian law, without formal charges. When the formal charges were presented, his lawyers challenged the assigning of the charges to the most serious level of offense. This challenge failed, but as a result the presentation of arguments was further delayed until December 27, 1995. Hosni's lawyers asked for and received a postponement on that date because they had not received the case dossier from the prosecution. His lawyers finally received the file on January 2, 1996 on the eve of the trial then scheduled to begin on January 3, 1996.
When the court convened, Hosni's lawyers first requested a postponement in order to study the prosecution evidence in the case file. This was denied. They also requested permission to present additional witnesses, including a handwriting expert to challenge state testimony that the signature of Moncef Rezgui as it appeared on the contract appeared to be forged, and other witnesses who had conducted business with Moncef in the months preceding his death at a time when the prosecution alleged he had been completely incapacitated. All motions for the defense were denied and the lawyers withdrew themselves from the court in protest. Without lawyers to represent him, Hosni refused to plead on his own behalf. Nevertheless, the judges withdrew and returned to convict Hosni and to sentence him to eight years in prison.
While Hosni underwent this ordeal at the hands of a tainted criminal justice system, his supporters around the world did not stand idle. Immediately on hearing of his arrest, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights featured the case on its Lawyer-to-Lawyer Network. Thousands of lawyers in the United States and around the world were contacted individually or through their bar associations and organizations and urged to write letters to the Tunisian government questioning the basis of Hosni's detention.
The Lawyers Committee repeatedly requested permission from the Tunisian government to send representatives to meet with Hosni in prison to see his circumstances, and to learn first hand his version of the events that led to his arrest. The Tunisian government refused, even going so far as to suggest that such visits would be contrary to Tunisian law -- an assertion which, on further investigation, proved to be groundless. The Tunisian government was simply trying to stop the truth -- that the case against Hosni was a fabrication -- from emerging.
An International Campaign
By the end of 1994 the Lawyers Committee was convinced that the charges against Hosni were unfounded and began to call for his unconditional and immediate release. An international campaign for Hosni's release began to build momentum when Amnesty International adopted Hosni as a prisoner of conscience (a prisoner detained solely for his non-violent views or activities).In June 1995 the Dickinson School of Law awarded Hosni an honorary degree to mark his contribution to human rights and the rule of law in Tunisia. Later that year, at its annual convention in Chicago, the Litigation Section of the American Bar Association gave its annual international human rights award to Hosni. Members of the United States Congress wrote letters to the Tunisian President calling for Hosni's release, prompting responses from the Tunisian Embassy which provided no satisfactory answers to the questions surrounding Hosni's conviction.
Perhaps disturbed by the growing international campaign that was gaining ground in Europe and the United States, the Tunisian government initiated new charges against Hosni, seeking to link him with political violence. Prosecutors obtained statements from imprisoned supporters of the Islamist An-Nahda organization stating that Hosni had taken possession of two starter pistols on behalf of the group. These statements were uncorroborated by any other evidence. In November 1995, Hosni himself was taken for interrogation in the notorious Ministry of Interior building in Tunis, where he was beaten while being suspended from a pole by his wrists and ankles. His lawyers and the Tunisian Bar Association submitted official complaints about his torture, but received no reply.
When the charges finally made it to court in November 1996, the case fell apart. The prisoners who had testified against him withdrew their testimony stating that they had been coerced by torture into signing it. In the absence of any evidence against him, Hosni was acquitted of these new charges -- the first sign of a crack in the government's implacable insistence on Hosni's guilt despite the overwhelming weight of the evidence pointing to his innocence.
Meanwhile, Hosni's cause continued to gain international notoriety. When Tunisian Minister of Justice Sadok Chaabane spoke before the Paris Bar Association, he found himself under hostile questioning about the treatment of Hosni and what the case indicated about the situation of lawyers and the rule of law in Tunisia. In February 1996, the Bordeaux Bar Association awarded Hosni the Ludovic Trarieux Human Rights Prize, an honor previously bestowed on Nelson Mandela, among others. The Tunisian government protested the bestowal of such an award on Hosni.
France's close cultural links with Tunisia, and the importance of France and the European Union to Tunisia as a trading partner, gave these events a particular importance in the international campaign for his release. In November 1996, the French Prime Minister's office released a statement of concern about human rights in Tunisia that listed Hosni's detention as a human rights violation requiring remedy. Hosni's supporters hoped that this international pressure would prompt the Tunisian government to reconsider his continued imprisonment.
And so it proved to be. On December 17, 1996, Hosni was the first of three prisoners to receive a presidential pardon and be released from prison. The other two, opposition parliamentarians Mohammed Mouadda and Khemais Chammari, were also freed by the end of the year, paving the way, the Tunisian government now hopes, for a forthcoming Ben Ali state visit to France untroubled by embarrassing human rights questions.
Hosni's release is cause for celebration and a demonstration that speaking out against a violation of human rights anywhere in the world can lead to its alleviation.Yet problems remain. Nejib Hosni has paid a heavy price for his defense of human rights and the rule of law and has been granted only a conditional pardon. It is not yet clear that he will be able to return to his work as a lawyer. Much remains to be done if his sacrifice is to bear fruit in the development of respect for human rights in Tunisia. The Lawyers Committee is continuing to call on the Tunisian government to give Hosni his unconditional liberty, to restore to him his right to practice his profession and to respect the rule of law.
Neil Hicks is coordinator of the Middle East and North Africa Program, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, based in New York.
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