Blog 8 : Tunisia: Draft "Political Exclusion Law"

The draft law in Tunisia called “Political Exclusion Law” which will exclude senior members of the former ruling party from political life is said to be a disproportionate restriction on political rights. To better clarify, this law would ban members of the successive Ben Ali governments beginning in 1987 as well as members of the former ruling party which is the Constitutional Democratic Rally (Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique, RCD), who help specific positions from joining other political parties. A law such as this one would set the stage for the near-total political exclusion of thousands of people based on what their political association had been in the past. Joe Stork, who is the deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch said, “Authorities may have a legitimate interest in excluding senior members of the former ruling party from elected office temporarily, but this law would effectively ban thousands of people from all political activity, thus depriving them one of their fundamental rights.” The draft law would be an added paragraph to article 7 of the 2011 law on political parties which states that people who held leading positions between November 7, 1987 and January 14, 2011, are now prohibited for five years from the time the law takes effect from belonging to any current political party.

Even though the governing coalition parties said their intention was only to protect Tunisia's nascent democracy from the old guard, who could easily rely on patronage and local prestige to win seats and use their influence to interfere in future elections I see it in no way fair being as thousand of citizens from all areas of political life are being deprived of one of their fundamental rights. Thousands of people will lose their say in government and the reasoning behind why this is being done seems quite unclear. I think this is just the governments way of taking power away from a democratic society and making it into more of a dictatorship.

http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/10/13/tunisia-draft-political-exclusion-law-invites-abuse