Tunisia draft charter lacking on rights

Tunisia’s draft constitution still lacks full provision for human rights despite making some progress, Human Rights Watch said yesterday in a letter to the National Constituent Assembly. The US-based watchdog said that it wrote urging the interim Parliament to “amend those articles of the second draft of the constitution that risk undermining human rights.” Such articles include “a broad formulation of permissible limitations on rights and freedoms, weak guarantees for the independence of the judiciary, immunity for the head of state, and discrimination based on religion,” it said. Tunisia’s assembly made the second draft of the new constitution public on Dec. 14, but it is still being negotiated between the ruling Ennahda party and its allies and the opposition. HRW said there was “no explicit mention of the international framework of human rights or to ‘universal human rights,’ in contrast to the previous constitution.” It said this fails to situate rights freedoms “in their universally understood meaning and risks opening the door to divergent interpretations incompatible with universally recognized human rights.” But HRW also cited as positive the fact that the draft drops “the criminalization of all attacks on ‘the sacred’ and the criminalization of any form of ‘normalization’ with ‘Zionism and the Zionist state’.” It also said the new draft “contains language that better protects equal rights for women.” In its letter, signed by HRW’s Middle East and North Africa executive director Sarah Leah Whitson, the watchdog said immunity accorded to the head of state was excessive.