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Tunisian police used pepper spray to disperse protesters against President Kais Saied’s planned July referendum on Saturday, nearly a year after he seized wide-ranging powers in what opponents decry as a coup.
The police blocked the protesters, who numbered around 100, as they attempted to reach the headquarters of the electoral commission, whose chief Saied replaced last month in a further extension of his control of state institutions. Some at the protest in Tunis, organised by five small political parties, held up placards reading “the president’s commission = fraud commission”.
“The police… sprayed gas in our faces and attacked us,” said Hamma Hammami, head of the Tunisian Workers’ Party. Saied on July 25 sacked the government and suspended parliament, which he later dissolved in moves that sparked fears for the only democracy to have emerged from the Arab Spring uprisings.
He also seized control of the judiciary, and on Thursday summarily sacked 57 judges, accusing them of corruption and other crimes. On Saturday the Tunisian bar association announced a national strike in “all criminal, administrative and financial courts” for a renewable period of a week, starting Monday.
Dozens of judges present at an emergency meeting in Tunis “strongly condemn the president’s continued interference in the judiciary”, they said in a statement. They accused Saied of giving himself powers to lay off judges “without the slightest recourse to disciplinary procedures, violating the most basic right to defence as guaranteed in the constitution.”
Saied has laid out plans for a referendum next month on a replacement of the 2014 constitution that had enshrined a mixed parliamentary-presidential system often plagued by deadlock and nepotism. But the draft of the new constitution, which is to be put to the public in a simple…
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Source : france24
