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Tunisia Jails Critic of President for 8 Months

Tunisian lawyer Sonia Dahmani. Photo: Social media
Tunisian lawyer Sonia Dahmani. Photo: Social media
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Tunisia Jails Critic of President for 8 Months

Tunisian lawyer Sonia Dahmani. Photo: Social media
Tunisian lawyer Sonia Dahmani. Photo: Social media

A Tunisian appeals court sentenced a lawyer and media figure to eight months in prison, her lawyer said Wednesday, over comments deemed critical of President Kais Saied.
Sonia Dahmani, 56, was arrested on May 11 when masked police raided Tunisia’s bar association, where she had sought refuge, following her remarks made on television.
Initially sentenced to one year in prison on July 6, she appealed.
Her lawyer, Pierre-Francois Feltesse, said the eight-month sentence was issued late Tuesday without her legal representatives being able to enter a plea, after the hearing was suspended.
The defense team said in a statement to AFP that Dahmani had been “subjected a disgraceful body search” in custody and forced to wear a “long white veil” usually reserved for women prosecuted for sexual offenses, despite no legal basis for it.
Feltesse said her case would be referred to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
The charges stemmed from comments Dahmani made on TV, sarcastically questioning Tunisia’s state of affairs in response to claims sub-Saharan migrants were settling in the country.

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Security Council Extends Arms Embargo on Darfur

FILE PHOTO: Members of the United Nations Security Council gather during a meeting about the situation in Venezuela, in New York, US, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
FILE PHOTO: Members of the United Nations Security Council gather during a meeting about the situation in Venezuela, in New York, US, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
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Security Council Extends Arms Embargo on Darfur

FILE PHOTO: Members of the United Nations Security Council gather during a meeting about the situation in Venezuela, in New York, US, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
FILE PHOTO: Members of the United Nations Security Council gather during a meeting about the situation in Venezuela, in New York, US, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

The UN Security Council extended an arms embargo on Sudan's Darfur region for another year, after experts said it had been regularly violated amid the ongoing civil war.

In a resolution adopted unanimously, the Council extended until September 12, 2025 the sanctions regime in place since 2005, which is aimed solely at Darfur, AFP reported.

That includes individual sanctions -- asset freezes and a travel ban -- on three people, and an arms embargo.

The "people of Darfur continue to live in danger and desperation and despair ... This adoption sends an important signal to them that the international community remains focused on their plight," said deputy US ambassador Robert Wood.

Though sanctions do not apply to the whole country, their renewal "will restrict the movement of arms into Darfur and sanction individuals and entities contributing to or complicit in destabilizing activities in Sudan," he said.

More than 16 months of war between rival Sudanese generals has killed tens of thousands of people and triggered what the United Nations calls the world's worst internal displacement crisis.

The war pits the army under Sudan's de facto leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against the RSF, led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

The UN and humanitarian organizations fear that the war could degenerate into new ethnic violence, particularly in Darfur.

Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the decision was a "missed opportunity" by the Council to extend the embargo to the whole of Sudan.

China and Russia, permanent members of the Security Council who abstained the last time the embargo was renewed, in 2023, this time voted in favor.

The move "will go some way towards stemming the steady flow of illicit arms into the battlefield and calming down and deescalating the situation on the ground," said deputy Chinese ambassador Dai Bing.

He said the sanctions were "a means, not an end. They must not replace diplomacy."

In their annual report, published in January, experts charged by the Council with monitoring the sanctions regime said the arms embargo had been violated multiple times.