The Tunis Court of First Instance has handed down prison sentences of three and a half years against journalists Mourad Zoghlami and Borhane Bsaies, in addition to imposing heavy financial penalties and ordering the confiscation of their assets and their shares in the companies in which they hold stakes, in favour of the public treasury.
The ruling was issued by the criminal chamber, with both journalists appearing in custody, following a prolonged judicial process that began with their arrest over media statements and published content, before financial cases were subsequently opened against them. This chronological sequence clearly points to the transfer of the case from the realm of opinion and expression to that of criminal prosecution, in a pattern that has become increasingly recurrent in Tunisia in recent years.
Tunisian authorities had arrested Mourad Zoghlami on 12 May 2024, and Borhane Bsaies on 11 May of the same year, due to their positions, media statements, radio and television appearances, and social media posts. Initial rulings later sentenced them to one year in prison, which were reduced on appeal to eight months. Just days before the completion of their sentences, a new decision was issued on 3 December 2024 to place them back in detention, this time on charges of money laundering, turning their detention into a continuous successive prosecutions.
This trajectory is marked by serious procedural violations, most notably the issuance of detention warrants without genuine interrogation, the failure to grant the defence full access to the case files, and the repeated rejection of requests for release. Such practices fundamentally undermine the presumption of innocence and transform pre-trial detention from an exceptional measure into a form of prior punishment.
Although the verdict was framed within the context of “financial cases”, the facts point to a clear politicisation of criminalisation, whereby the criminal judiciary is invoked after silencing critical media voices, not before. This constitutes a direct violation of the Tunisian Constitution, the principle of judicial independence, and international obligations that prohibit punishing journalists for their work or opinions under the guise of vague and elastic legal provisions.
The confiscation of assets and corporate shares represents an additional punitive measure of a deterrent nature, going beyond the notion of legal accountability to inflict deliberate economic harm, thereby deepening the impact of the ruling and transforming it into an act of intimidation directed at the entire media community.
The case of Mourad Zoghlami and Borhane Bsaies reflects a dangerous shift in the relationship between the Tunisian state and press freedom, whereby direct censorship tools are replaced with punitive trials, and a climate of fear is reproduced through imprisonment and confiscation rather than explicit bans.
What has occurred constitutes a clear violation of freedom of opinion and expression, and of the principles of fair trial. It confirms that the judiciary is being used to settle accounts with critical voices, through rulings that do not merely target two individuals, but strike at the collective right of Tunisian society to free and independent media, pushing the country yet another step back towards the authoritarian repression against which Tunisians once rose in revolt.
