TUNIS: A Tunisian court has freed a group of humanitarian workers after handing them suspended sentences for facilitating the “illegal entry and residence” of migrants, a support committee said on Tuesday.
Sherifa Riahi, the former director of the French NGO Terre d’Asile, and several members of her staff had already spent more than 20 months in jail by the time of their final hearing on Monday.
Hours after the hearing, Riahi’s support committee posted a video of her leaving prison overnight, announcing her colleagues had also been freed.
Mahmoud Daoud Yaacoub, a member of Riahi’s defense team, told AFP that the court had handed down a two-year suspended sentence to the defendants who were in pre-trial detention.
“Tomorrow we will learn the rest of the judgment regarding the defendants who are out on bail,” he said.
The NGO employees were accused alongside 17 municipal workers from the eastern city of Sousse who were implicated for having lent premises to the organization.
The 23 defendants, who were also charged with “conspiracy with the aim of housing or hiding people who entered clandestinely,” had faced up to 10 years in prison.
Other charges, including ones alleging financial misdeeds, were previously dropped.
The defendants’ lawyers had argued they were simply carrying out humanitarian work under a state-approved program, in coordination with the government.
On the last day of the trial on Monday, a handful of people gathered outside the courthouse in support of the defendants. The final hearing lasted all day and as night fell, the court retired to consider the verdict.
The UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, had on Sunday urged “the authorities to release her (Riahi) instead of trying her on dubious charges related to her defense of migrant rights.”
Migration is a sensitive issue in Tunisia, a key transit point for tens of thousands of people seeking to reach Europe each year.
The defendants were arrested in May 2024 along with about a dozen humanitarian workers, including anti-racism pioneer Saadia Mosbah, whose trial is to start later this month.
In February 2023, President Kais Saied said “hordes of illegal migrants,” many from sub-Saharan Africa, posed a demographic threat to the Arab-majority country.
His speech triggered a series of racially motivated attacks as thousands of sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia were pushed out of their homes and jobs.
Thousands were repatriated or attempted to cross the Mediterranean, while others were expelled to the desert borders with Algeria and Libya, where at least a hundred died that summer.
This came as the European Union boosted efforts to curb arrivals on its southern shores, including a 255-million-euro ($290 million) deal with Tunis.
