TUNIS: Human Rights Watch on Friday urged Tunisia to extend the mandate of a commission set up to examine human rights violations during six decades of dictatorship.
The widely-praised Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD) was set up following the 2011 revolt that toppled dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali and sparked the Arab Spring uprisings.
Tunisia’s parliament is set to vote on Saturday whether to prolong its work.
But HRW’s Tunisia director, Amna Guellali, accused Tunisian authorities of hampering the commission “by refusing to fully cooperate with it and by adopting a controversial law on administrative reconciliation.”
“By voting ‘no’ to extending the commission’s work, parliament would be voting ‘yes’ for impunity,” she said in a statement.
The commission has a five-year mandate to investigate human rights violations between 1957, when Habib Bourguiba became president, and 2013, when the IVD was set up in the wake of the revolution.
It aims to hold perpetrators to account and rehabilitate their victims.
A “no” vote on Saturday could force it to cease work in May.
That “would sabotage the fragile transitional justice process and trample the rights of victims to truth, justice and reparations,” Guellali said.
HRW urges Tunisia to extend rights commission’s mandate
HRW urges Tunisia to extend rights commission’s mandate
Syrian leader to meet Putin, Russia seeks deal on military bases
- Russia’s continued sheltering of Assad and his wife since their ouster remains a thorny issue
MOSCOW: Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa will meet Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, as the Kremlin seeks to secure the future of its military bases in the country.
Putin and Sharaa struck a conciliatory tone at their previous meeting in October, their first since Sharaa’s rebel forces toppled Moscow-ally Bashar Assad in 2024.
But Russia’s continued sheltering of Assad and his wife since their ouster remains a thorny issue. Sharaa has repeatedly pushed Russia for their extradition.
Sharaa, meanwhile, has embraced US President Donald Trump, who on Tuesday praised the Syrian leader as “highly respected” and said things were “working out very well.”
Putin, whose influence in the Middle East has waned since Assad’s ouster, is seeking to maintain Russia’s military footprint in the region.
Russia withdrew its forces from the Qamishli airport in Kurdish-held northeast Syria earlier this week, leaving it with only the Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast — its only military outposts outside the former Soviet Union.
“A discussion is planned on the status of bilateral relations and prospects for developing them in various fields, as well as the current situation in the Middle East,” the Kremlin said of the upcoming meeting in a statement on Tuesday.
Russia was a key ally of Assad during the bloody 14-year Syrian civil war, launching air strikes on rebel-held areas of Syria controlled by Sharaa’s Islamist forces.
The toppling of Assad dealt a major blow to Russia’s influence in the region and laid bare the limits of Moscow’s military reach amid the Ukraine war.
The United States, which cheered Assad’s demise, has fostered ever-warmer ties with Sharaa — even as Damascus launched a recent offensive against Kurdish forces long backed by the West.
Despite Trump’s public praise, both the United States and Europe have expressed concern that the offensive in Syria’s northeast could precipitate the return of Islamic State forces held in Kurdish-held jails.
