For Sihem Bensedrine, a 74-year-old Tunisian rights activist, being in her cell at the Manouba women's prison became unbearable last week.

"I can't stand the injustice that's hitting me anymore," she posted on her Facebook pageon January 14.

"I am determined to pull myself out, at all costs, of this black hole that I was arbitrarily thrown into," she wrote.

She has been on hunger strike ever since.

Bensedrine has been in pre-trial detention since last August, on charges of fraud and "gaining unfair advantages," as well as accusations of forging part of an official report while she was head of Tunisia's Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD).

Her lawyer, human rights organizations and the United Nations have all called the accusations baseless.

"There is no justification for the detention," as Ayachi Hammami, a member of Bensedrine's defense team and a prominent human rights activist himself, told DW. 

"It would be different if Bensedrine posed a threat to security, or if she could affect the evidence in the case," he said. 

"I  don't believe that Bensedrine's detention is in any way different from the vast majority of jailed political opponents that are prosecuted for opinions that are contrary to Tunisia's authorities," Hammami told DW.

According to the recently published Human Rights Watch World Report 2025, more than 80 individuals remained in detention on political grounds or for exercising their fundamental rights in Tunisia as of November.

Using political pretence to dismantle institutions and jail opponents

Tunisia's human rights situation has been on a downward spiral since July 2021, when Tunisia's President Kais Saied began to aggressively consolidate power.

Step by step, Saied has since dismantled most of the country's democratic institutions, including the judiciary, which is no longer independent.

In Saied's telling, such moves are necessary and justifiable steps in what he calls the country's "war of national liberation" from problems driven by economic crisis and migrants.

Last summer, in the run-up to Tunisia's presidential elections, the human rights situation took yet another turn for the worse, with most candidates either barred from running against Saied or jailed.

Scores of journalists and activists, among them Sihem Bensedrine, were also jailed.

In October, Saied was elected to another five-year-term as president, in a vote that observers said was neither free nor democratic.

Saied's continued rule is not only bad news for his would-be political opponents, but also for the work of human rights activists in general, and those who investigate the abuses of Tunisia's past in particular.

Undermining justice for victims of past abuses

The current situation could not be more different from what it was in 2011, when the country was held up as the region's democratic role model after the Arab uprising.

Of all the "Arab Spring" countries, Tunisia was the only one to establish an official body to ensure justice for thousands of victims of human rights abuses under previous regimes between 1955 and 2013, the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD).

Sihem Bensedrine was chosen to head the commission during its four-year mandate due to the extensive experience she gained during four decades as a human rights activist.

But not everyone welcomed the commission's work. Security and judicial authorities, for example, repeatedly blocked access to archival evidence as well as refusing to release the names of implicated politicians.

Yet over time, the IVD documented over 62,000 criminal complaints and some 10,000 cases of torture.

In December 2018, at the end of its mandate, the commission referred 205 cases of grave human rights abuses by politicians, security officials and businesspeople to Tunisia's Specialized Criminal Chambers for prosecution.

Of these, 23 cases were linked to corruption allegations against state officials.

Since then, however, not much has happened in terms of accountability.

According to Tunisia's Civil Coalition for the Defense of Transitional Justice, not one judgement has been handed down over the past six years.

Furthermore, in May 2022, Saied issued, by decree, a law granting amnesty to businesspeople prosecuted for financial crimes if they agreed to repay the disputed amount of their ill-gotten gains or invest them in regional development.

That same year, constitutional transitional justice guarantees were omitted from the country's new constitution, which was designed by Saied himself.

The situation has become so dire that Tunisian human rights activist Adel Ben Ghazi says he is about to lose all hope that the government will ever follow through with the country's transitional justice promises.

"Transitional justice has become a faltering cause in Tunisia," he told DW.

"As of now, victims have not received any form of justice," he said, adding that "they are still suffering today."

Weak and exhausted as hunger strike drags on

None of these developments have been good news for human rights activist Sihem Bensedrine either.

"A former member of the commission alleged in May 2020 that Bensedrine had essentially falsified the part of the report focused on corruption in the banking system," Bassam Khawaja, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, told DW.

"We've reviewed that complaint and we don't think it has any merit," Khawaja said.

When Bensedrine was detained on August 1, Khawaja wrote on the rights organization's website that, "this is a clear case of retaliation, and authorities should immediately release Bensedrine, drop the charges, and stop targeting human rights defenders."

The United Nations also said in a statementthat Bensedrine's arrest "could amount to judicial harassment … for work she has undertaken" as head of the commission, and that it "appears to be aimed at discrediting" the commission's report.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, day nine of her hunger strike, Bensedrine was visited by members of the Tunisian Association for the Defense of Human Rights, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and her deputy lawyer.

In a statement, they later reported on Bensedrine's Facebook page that she showed alarming signs of exhaustion, adding that she had to be put on oxygen during the daytime. 

DW reached out to President Kais Saied with a request for comment but at the time of publication had not received a reply.

Edited by: Jon Shelton