Another history of Kais Saied’s era in Tunisia remains unwritten. It is not only the history of constitutions and unlawful decrees, trials devoid of justice, or institutions dismantled or brought under control. It is also the history of the women who have lived through these years, in prisons and courtrooms, in exile, in the media, on the streets and across digital spaces.
Writing that history will take time. Books are not published overnight, testimonies require distance before they can be put into words, and memory does not move at the pace of those in power or of breaking news. What is certain, however, is that women will fill many pages documenting this period.
This goes beyond compiling the names of women who have been imprisoned, prosecuted, or subjected to smear campaigns. The more important question is this: when a woman enters into political confrontation with those in power, does she pay the same price as a man?
In Tunisia today, the answer appears more complicated.
Not every woman subjected to prosecution in Tunisia has been targeted because she is a woman, just as the authorities’ crackdown has by no means been limited to women. International human rights organizations have documented the widening scope of arrests and prosecutions targeting opposition figures, journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders and activists of all genders and across different political currents.
But when the target is a woman, political punishment is often accompanied by another, unwritten trial: one that puts her reputation, body, private life, and personal conduct on trial.
From Political Exclusion to Prison
Tunisian women had achieved a remarkable level of political representation compared with much of the region, particularly through gender parity mechanisms established under previous electoral laws. But the electoral law introduced under Kais Saied in 2022 abolished mechanisms that had supported parity, immediately affecting women’s representation.
A United Nations study on the 2022–2023 elections found that women accounted for just 15.6 percent of those elected, while UN Women data puts women’s share of parliamentary seats at approximately 15.7 percent.
These figures matter because they reveal something that goes beyond the number of seats: the story of women during this period does not begin at the prison gates. Before imprisonment comes the reshaping of the political sphere itself, and of the rules governing women’s access to it. Individual cases then make an already troubling picture even harsher.
Abir Moussi, leader of the Free Destourian Party and an outspoken political opponent of Kais Saied, has been imprisoned since October 2023. In March 2026, an appeals court sentenced her to ten years in prison in what the media has known as the “Presidential Registry Office” case. Amnesty International described the conviction as being based on unfounded charges and called for her release.
Chaima Issa, an opposition activist and member of the National Salvation Front, was sentenced on appeal to 20 years in prison in the case commonly known as the “conspiracy against state security” case. She was subsequently arrested in November 2025 after taking part in a protest against Kais Saied. Amnesty International had described the case and the trials of those charged in it as politically motivated and called for the convictions to be quashed.
Sihem Bensedrine, former president of Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission and one of the country’s most prominent human rights figures, was sentenced in June 2026 to 25 years in prison in two cases related to her work leading the commission and preparing its final report. International human rights organizations described the ruling as an attack on the transitional justice process itself.
Also in June 2026, a court upheld an eight-year prison sentence against Saadia Mosbah, president of the Mnemty association and a prominent anti-racism activist, following nearly two years in pretrial detention. Amnesty International described the financial charges against her as baseless and linked to her human rights work.
Following the ruling, lawyer and feminist activist Hala Ben Salem wrote of her client that it was “a case with a color,” suggesting that Mosbah was paying the price for being Black. Her prosecution came after a virulent racist campaign by some of Kais Saied’s supporters targeting both Mosbah and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, amid claims of a “conspiracy to settle Africans” in Tunisia.
In addition, sentences have been handed down against lawyers Sonia Dahmani, Bochra Belhaj Hmida and Dalila Msadek, the sister of opposition politician Jaouhar Ben Mbarek, who himself was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Civil society activists, human rights defenders, journalists and political activists have also faced prosecution, including Ghofrane Binous, Siwar Bargaoui, Salwa Ghreissa, Cherifa Riahi, Hager Aouadi, Khawla Boukrim, Chadha Haj Mbarek, Leila Kallel, Olfa Hamdi, Bouthaina Ben Ghilane, Mariem Bennour, Imen Wardani and Mira Ben Salah, as well as defenders of Palestinian rights such as Sanaa Msahli and Jawaher Chenna.
Some of these women have served part of their sentences but remain subject to ongoing legal proceedings and could be imprisoned again at any moment. Some remain behind bars today, while others have effectively been forced into exile to avoid being swallowed by the prison system.
These women do not belong to a single political family. Indeed, profound ideological and political differences separate many of them. That is precisely one of the defining features of the Saied era: repression has not required its victims to agree politically to bring them together in the same place.
When a Woman Becomes a “Moral Case”
But prison is only the visible part of the punishment. There is another form that is far harder to capture in court statistics: when a woman’s life itself becomes political ammunition.
A male opposition figure may be accused of treason, conspiracy, serving foreign interests, or spreading false information. A woman can face all the same accusations, only to find another set of questions piled on top of them: What does she wear? How does she live? Who is she involved with? Is she “too liberated”? Is she religious? Does she wear the hijab, and what lies behind that choice? How does she speak? Where does she go? What is on her phone, in her messages, and in her photos?
At that point, the objective is no longer merely to silence a political position. It is to destroy the woman’s moral legitimacy in society’s eyes.
This phenomenon is by no means unique to Tunisia. In many Arab societies, reputation becomes part of the arsenal of political conflict when the opponent is a woman. Instead of confronting what she has said, the debate shifts towards putting her on trial for who she is and for how she has chosen to live her life.
The most absurd paradox is that a woman cannot “win” in this court. If she is liberal in her lifestyle, that freedom is used against her. If she is religious, her faith can be questioned, or she can be accused of hypocrisy and contradiction. Either way, her ideas and political positions stop being the real subject of debate. The woman herself becomes the accusation.
Human rights reports on Tunisia have documented online smear and intimidation campaigns against journalists and activists, noting in particular that women journalists have been subjected to smear campaigns and threats. They have also documented cases involving the publication of personal information and online incitement targeting women human rights defenders.
The author of these lines knows this mechanism well, not merely as a theoretical concept, but because she has been experiencing it on an almost daily basis since April 28, 2026.
On that date, after she denounced the arrest of journalist Zied El Heni and defended his right to freedom and to practice journalism, a vicious campaign against her erupted on social media. Accounts, pages, and individuals who openly declare their support for Kais Saied led and amplified it.
Since then, it has ceased to be a passing wave of abuse that flares up for a few days before fading away. Instead, it has evolved into near-daily digital targeting. The material changes, but the mechanism remains the same: whenever she expresses a political position or publishes critical journalism, the online attacks return, accompanied by smear campaigns, accusations of treason, and personal attacks.
Over time, the campaign moved beyond attacks on her journalism and political positions and became an attempt to put her on trial as a woman. Her photographs were used against her. Images were taken out of context, while other visual material was manipulated or fabricated. Statements she had never made were attributed to her, while details and allegations about her private and family life were weaponized to undermine her character and reputation.
In other words, the question was no longer: What did this journalist say, and was what she said right or wrong? Instead, it became: Who is this woman? How does she live? And what can be extracted, distorted, or invented from her life to be used against her?
Nor did the escalation stop at defamation or the weaponization of her private life. It eventually developed into intimidation and direct threats. At one point, the author received an explicit death threat, prompting her to file a complaint with French police in August 2026.
This shift matters because it reveals how the process can begin with a sarcastic social media post, a fabricated image, or a rumor about someone’s private life, before impunity accumulates to the point where threats of violence become a seemingly natural extension of the digital campaign.
What happened was no longer merely the author’s personal account. On May 14, 2026, Skyline International for Human Rights condemned the escalating harassment, gender-based digital violence and judicial intimidation targeting journalist Khawla Boukrim. It described what she had endured as an ongoing and coordinated smear campaign across social media, particularly Facebook, linked to her critical coverage of Kais Saied’s rule.
The organization documented the circulation of manipulated images of Boukrim, statements falsely attributed to he,r and fabricated claims about her private life, eventually extending to attacks on her family and her father, who died more than a quarter of a century ago. It drew particular attention to the gendered nature of the campaign, arguing that manipulated images, sexually suggestive defamation and attacks on family members were not random forms of abuse, but part of a pattern targeting women in public life. It called for investigations into the smear campaigns and the role played by networks of pro-government accounts.
In July of the same year, ARTICLE 19 went beyond Boukrim’s individual case, listing her among several Tunisian women subjected to smear campaigns, hate speech and online harassment targeting their private lives. The organization stressed that weaponizing a woman’s gender, appearance, private life or family status to demean her and drive her out of the public sphere is not legitimate political criticism, but a form of gender-based violence and discrimination.
The Committee to Protect Journalists also documented what it described as an apparently coordinated online smear campaign against the author. At the same time, Reporters Without Borders later noted that she had been subjected to online defamation because of her coverage of Tunisian politics. The fact-checking platform “She Checks” also debunked one of the disinformation campaigns targeting her, demonstrating how an image from her coverage of a protest in Paris had been taken out of context and used to attribute a fabricated statement to her, triggering incitement and gendered attacks.
But this experience is not the author’s alone, nor does this form of targeting apply to only one type of woman. A woman perceived by society as “liberal” can be smeared because of her independence and lifestyle. Yet conservative or religious women are not spared the same mechanism; only the language used to demean them changes.
This was evident, for example, in the online campaigns targeting Ennahda figure Mariem Bennour. Attacks against her did not remain confined to disagreements over her political affiliation or positions. She was described as a “slave girl” to the movement’s leader, Rached Ghannouchi, and to its male members, alongside other deeply personal and gendered insults. Once again, the woman and her presumed relationship to men became the subject of attack, rather than her views, ideas, or political responsibility.
Bennour received only limited feminist solidarity. She, too, was effectively tried twice: first by the authorities, which sentenced her to ten years in prison over videos critical of the government, and then by society, where even supporting her through a purely Tunisian human rights statement risked being interpreted as support for Ennahda.
Here the paradox reveals itself in full. If a woman leads an independent life, that independence is weaponized against her. If she is conservative or religious, her conservatism and faith are themselves used to restrict or demean her. One becomes “too liberated”; another becomes a “slave girl” or a woman “subordinate to a man.” In both cases, the objective is to find the gendered point of attack most capable of wounding her socially rather than confronting her politically.
This is how we know that morality was never really the issue. A moral standard that changes according to the identity of the opponent is not a standard at all. It is an instrument of punishment.
Shaming a woman for being liberal or religious says little about her and much more about an opponent incapable of confronting her ideas and positions. Personal freedom is not a crime. Religious faith is not a crime. A woman’s private life is not evidence for the prosecution, nor does it become public property simply because she chooses to become a journalist, politician, activist or opposition figure.
It reveals an inability to confront women in the arenas of politics, ideas, and public debate, replacing argument with scrutiny of their clothes, relationships, private lives, lifestyles, and beliefs before trying to turn all of it into accusations. This is precisely where defaming women becomes a political practice, even when it disguises itself in the language of morality.
This Is Not a Story of “Weak Women”
Yet reading all of this merely as a story about the persecution of weak women would be another mistake. History is likely to remember not only what was done to them, but also what those efforts failed to achieve.
Women have not disappeared from Tunisian politics.
Women journalists have not disappeared. Women lawyers have not disappeared. Human rights and feminist voices have not disappeared.
But they have grown quieter.
Who Will Write This Era When It Is Over?
Every government can, for a time, control official documents, news bulletins and the discourse of the state. It can decide who speaks and who remains silent, who appears on television and who goes to prison.
But it cannot monopolize the story forever.
The testimonies of imprisoned women will come. So will the testimonies of those who waited for them outside prison walls. Journalists, politicians, lawyers, human rights defenders and activists will write. So will women whose names never appeared in a newspaper.
They will write about prison, exile and fear, but also about resistance.
They will write about women’s private lives being weaponized against them, about attempts to turn their choices and lifestyles into evidence for the prosecution, about threats and intimidation, hacking and surveillance. They will write about those who wore the masks of friendship, kindness, and intimacy to collect information that could later be used for defamation and blackmail.
They will write about those who remained silent, those who justified what was happening, and those who turned hatred into a profession and defamation into a weapon.
But before all of that, they will write about one simple truth: the women they tried to drive out of public life remained there, despite prison and harassment.
That is why the real question is not how much a government can hurt a woman in the present, but who will own the story of this era once that government belongs to the past.
Kais Saied, like every ruler, will one day leave the presidential palace. But not all the books about his era have been written yet. Not all the women’s testimonies have been collected. Not all the archives have been opened.
Books do not come quickly, but eventually they do. And women’s ink will fill the pages.
Governments have limited lifespans. Memory outlives them all.
And that is why women’s memory will prevail over Kais Saied, in life and in death.
