Tunisia detains prominent migrants’ rights activist
Tunisia’s public prosecutor detained prominent activist and migrants’ rights group head Saadia Mosbah on May 7th, according to Reuters. The move purportedly came hours after the country’s president, Kais Saied, accused some groups working to defend sub-Saharan African migrants of treason.
Local media reported that police began investigating Mosbah, whose group fights racism and defends migrants’ rights, for supposed financial crimes.
Tunisia is amidst a severe migration crisis due to an influx of sub-Saharan Africans seeking to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. Tensions have turned particularly high in recent weeks, with residents of the southern town of El Amra demonstrating in favour of migrant deportations on May 4th.
READ: Tunisia: 37 migrants missing after vessel capsized
In a May 6th National Security Council meeting, Saied stated that “this [migrant] situation cannot continue and Tunisia will not be a land for the settlement of migrants.”
The president, who has presided over Tunisia’s substantial democratic regression and the ongoing economic crisis, went on to dub the leaders of migrants’ rights groups “traitors” and to suggest that they were being funded by unspecified foreign entities.
Saied, 66, claimed in 2023 that the arrival of thousands of illegal migrants from sub-Saharan African countries was a “conspiracy to change the county’s demographic makeup,” prompting the African Union to condemn what it called “hate speech.”
Tunisia has replaced Libya as North Africa’s main departure point for those fleeing poverty and conflict on the continent and the Middle East, in the hope of a better life in Europe.
Scapegoated for the country’s economic woes, hundreds of migrants were expelled from Tunis in the early hours of May 3rd and relocated to the Algerian border amid an escalating crackdown, as reported by AFP.
Reuters / AFP
