Tunisian jailed after refusing to watch president on TV: lawyer

TUNIS (AFP): A Tunisian inmate was sentenced to six months in prison after he was reported to authorities for refusing to watch a TV news segment about President Kais Saied, his lawyer and an NGO said Friday.

The inmate’s lawyer, Adel Sghaier, said his client was initially prosecuted under Article 67 of the penal code, which covers crimes against the head of state, but the charge was later revised to violating public decency to avoid giving the case a “political” dimension.

The local branch of the Tunisian League for Human Rights in the central town of Gafsa said that the inmate had “expressed his refusal to watch (coverage of) presidential activities” during a news broadcast that was playing on TV in his cell.

He was reported by a cellmate, investigated and later sentenced to six months behind bars, the NGO said, condemning what it called a “policy of gagging voices that even extends to prisoners in their cells.”

Sghaier said his client had been held over an unrelated case that was ultimately dismissed, and that his family only learnt of his other sentence when he wasn’t freed as expected.

He acknowledged that his client voiced insults and demanded the channel be changed when Saied’s image appeared on TV, explaining the man blamed the president for “ruining his life” by striking a deal with Italy for the deportation of irregular Tunisian immigrants.

The man had himself been deported from Italy, where he had been living without documentation.

A spokesman for the court in Gafsa could not be reached for comment.

Saied, elected in 2019, has ruled Tunisia by decree since a 2021 power grab, with local and international organizations decrying a decline in freedoms in the country considered the cradle of the “Arab Spring.”