At Yadh Ben Ahour
Evil in politics can take many forms. The one we are currently experiencing in our country allows unlimited political power to imprison its opponents, under the cover of arguments and prosecutions devoid of any justice or even legality, through unfair laws, subjugated and arbitrary justice and unbridled police. How does this evil succeed in justifying itself and maintaining itself? By a lie, wrapped in a false conception of democracy and sovereignty.
A democracy reduced to a single digit
Of democracy, in fact, he only retains the quantitative aspect, truncated moreover by biased elections, a repressed opposition, an imagined, mythologized people, having existence only in the minds of those who claim to speak in its name.
The magic trick behind this scene consists of claiming supreme legitimacy: the voice of the people. If the people want, everything becomes possible. Formulated this way, this principle becomes dangerous and loses all moral value. This will of the people in fact opens the door to the exercise of authority without counter-power and therefore without freedom. A deceived and manipulated people become the assassins of their own freedom. However, there is no political life worthy of the name without freedom.
The rule of law, largely forgotten
This conception of democracy forgets, or pretends to forget, that democracy is above all a quality of politics, that of a people enlightened by debate and not that of an alienated people, a people guaranteed their rights by impartial and honest judges, governed by a legitimate Constitution (and not legitimized after the fact) and tempered and controlled laws. This harmony of law, power, counter-powers and the people is called: “the rule of law”. We are very far from it. And we must do everything to save and restore this model.
The slogan “the people want” is nothing more than a smokescreen if it is devoid of this essential dimension. Even the people must be subject to a counter-power. Otherwise, it is the reign of dictatorship.
A sovereignty invoked to justify arbitrariness
Sovereignty, for its part, arises directly from the general will concretely expressed by majority suffrage and national representation. This is its legitimizing principle and its strength. But, in turn, sovereignty cannot be absolute. It does not give the right to promulgate restrictive exceptional laws, to distort the meaning or reasons of the law, to arrest and sanction people with heavy prison sentences, without tangible evidence and on the basis of a tendentious interpretation of the law.
The moral power of a State is manifested by the temperance of its laws and especially its penal laws. Only tyrannical states resort to the right of exception and systematic repression. When a State dares to arrest and condemn major national activist figures, like Néjib Chebbi, Ayachi Hammami or Chaïma Issa, and so many others, for a so-called plot against the security of the State, with sentences in this Orwellian trial going up to 66 years; that he imprison and sentence to five years an authentic jurist, judge and lawyer, Ahmed Souab, for a simple symbolic gesture of citizen protest; that he persecutes defenders of humanitarian aid and migrants like Saadia Mosbah; that he destroys the family life of Chérifa Riahi by separating her without humanity from her young child, that… and that… and that…, this State is no longer sovereign. He no longer governs according to political reason, but according to the instinct for self-preservation. He deserves no respect. The dark decade is not what they make it out to be.
Sovereignty is, moreover, also put forward to prevent foreign states or international organizations from denouncing these behaviors that violate freedoms. Here again a false conception of sovereignty appears. The latter must protect the State against foreign interference contrary to international law. Sovereignty is not intended to mask illicit state behavior. The latter must account for its actions before the international courtroom, on the basis of the principle of solidarity between States and the multilateralism of international organizations.
The sovereignty that we practice is a source of division, injustice, arbitrariness and violence. Moreover, it is an à la carte sovereignty which does not prevent its champions from transforming Tunisia into an Algerian protectorate.
As we reject populist democracy, we reject limitless sovereignty, nourished by illusions.
BIO EXPRESS
Yadh Ben Achour is an eminent Tunisian jurist, academic and intellectual, specialist in public law and 2025 laureate of the Boutros Boutros-Ghali International Peace Prize.
This article is a column, written by an author outside the newspaper and whose point of view does not commit the editorial staff.
