The Legal Agenda has issued a new publication titled “Hunger Before Judicial Subordination: Memoirs of an Attendant” [al-Ju’ wa-La Qada’ al-Khudu’: Mudhakkirat Murafiq] and authored by Judge Mohamed Afif Jaidi. In this unique testimony, the author – who is one of the founders of the Legal Agenda in Tunisia and has played a prominent role in the movement defending judicial independence – documents the extraordinary saga of the hunger strike conducted by five judges after they were fired without a trial in summer 2022.

This publication coincides with the second anniversary of the “Massacre of Judges”. In that incident, President Kais Saied arbitrarily fired 57 judges based on reports from the security forces, without respecting the most basic of defense rights and while launching an unprecedented smear campaign against them. The dismissals constituted a pivotal moment in the process of taking control of the judicial authority following 25 July 2021. They paved the way for what we are now witnessing in terms of widespread political arrests and trials, and violations of public freedoms. However, they also constituted a pivotal moment in the movement in defense of judicial independence because they were followed by an assembly of approximately a third of working judges, along with judges’ various representative bodies, in the National Council of the Tunisian Judges Association. There, they decided to go on a work strike that lasted an entire month, as well as to support the hunger strike.

In this booklet, the Legal Agenda has compiled the memoirs that it previously published in the summer and autumn of 2022 in serial form on its website. They document, from the inside, the details of the hunger strike, the political debates that occurred within it, the practical questions and challenges that confronted it, the outpouring of civil and political support, the dismay over the deteriorating health of the participating judges, and the joy of the victories that came in the form of stay-of-execution decisions issued by the Administrative Court in favor of 49 of the dismissed judges (decisions that the Ministry of Justice refused to apply). They thereby constitute an extraordinary document that not only sheds light on the experience of judicial resistance in an age when most institutions and elites are bowing to autocracy, but also highlights the human dimension of the judges’ community, which often goes ignored in public discourse about the judiciary.

The booklet is available, in Arabic, for download on the Legal Agenda’s website and in hard copy at its office in Tunisia.

This announcement is an edited translation from Arabic.