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March 8th, 2022 
Awake Goy 
The vice-president of Ennahda Movement in Tunisia announced on Sunday that he is refusing to end his hunger strike, Anadolu has reported. Noureddine Bhiri’s lawyers said that they hold the Minister of the Interior, Taoufik Charfeddine, responsible for Bhiri’s “kidnapping and arbitrary detention” with its resultant effect on his physical safety.
“A delegation from his defence team headed to the Habib Bougatfa Hospital in Bizerte in an attempt to try to convince Bhiri to end his hunger strike after his health deteriorated on Saturday night,” said the lawyers. “The delegation failed to convince him, and he insisted on continuing his hunger strike until the end of his unjust, arbitrary detention.”
According to Bhiri’s wife, Saeeda Al-Akrimi, her husband insisted on remaining in the anteroom of the hospital’s resuscitation ward. “He refused to return to his room,” she explained, “because it had become a place of extrajudicial detention in the absence of any medical follow-up.”
Ennahda announced on 31 December that Bhiri had been taken by plain-clothes security officers. He went on immediate hunger strike, and was transferred to hospital on 3 January when his health deteriorated.
Bhiri, who served as Tunisia’s minister of justice between 2011 and 2013, was placed under house arrest the following day, based upon a “suspicion of terrorism” related to the illegal issue of Tunisian identity and travel documents to Syrians. Ennahda and Bhiri’s lawyers denied the allegation. It was, they said, a political move.
Tunisia has been in a severe political crisis since last July, when President Kais Saied imposed a series of exceptional measures, including the suspension of parliament. Most of the country’s political and civil forces reject the measures as a “coup against the constitution”. Supporters believe that they are a “correction of the course of the 2011 revolution” which overthrew former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
READ: Tunisia: Order of Lawyers calls to release Kilani
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