May 16. (EUROPE PRESS) –
A Tunisian court has sentenced journalist Khalifa Guesmi to five years in prison on Tuesday for his information on an anti-terrorist operation in Tunisia, a sentence that increases the sentence handed down in November by four years, when he was sentenced to one year in prison.
Guesmi himself has confirmed the ruling in a message posted on his account on the social network Facebook and has stressed that “the ruling comes after the publication of an article on the Mosaique FM website that meets all the standards of the journalistic profession, such and as confirmed by national and international professional structures”.
Guesmi was convicted of refusing to reveal the identity of his sources after an article about the arrest of several terrorist suspects in the province of Kairouan (center), for which the Prosecutor’s Office accused him of maintaining ties with terrorist groups.
For his part, the president of the National Union of Journalists of Tunisia (SNJT), Muhamad Yasín Jelasi, has been “shocked” by the sentence against Guesmi, a correspondent for the Mosaique FM station in Kairúan. “This is the harshest sentence in the history of the Tunisian press, including the period of the dictatorship,” he denounced.
“It is a political message that testifies to a step forward in the repression against the press and journalists, to intimidate them through the courts,” Jelasi said, according to a statement published by the union on its website. “The SNJT denounces this unfair ruling and considers it a practical translation of the policy of limiting press freedom,” he argued.
For this reason, it has reiterated that it considers that the ruling “is a flagrant transgression” and “an explicit act that confirms the repressive position of the authorities”, for which it has made the Government responsible “for the deterioration of the state of freedom in Tunisia and of the use of the judicial apparatus to repress journalists, trade unionists and activists”.
