Thread by @rhizomyx

True. We didn't have that before 25 July and I'm afraid we won't have an independent judiciary any time soon. Nobody made any serious efforts to reform the judiciary after the 2011 revolution. Instead, political parties co-opted the most corrupt judges and empowered them.

https://twitter.com/Ferjani9arwi/status/1420088290921881601

Nidaa Tounes, Ennahdha, Tahya Tounes etc all had their networks of corrupt judges covering up the crimes of these political parties' leaders, which ranged from financial crimes to collusion with terrorist organisations. It was in nobody's interests to clean up the judiciary.

They picked the most corrupt judges from the old regime, and blackmailed them into submission on the basis of "kompromat". There has been no such thing as a fair trial in Tunisia. Not before 2011, not after. Any ordinary citizen who's faced the justice system knows that.

This, combined with the absolute lack of any serious security sector reform, largely explains why so many citizens believe that the democracy political parties are talking about is a sham, a fantasy. How can you expect a people to be attached to a purportedly democratic regime

when the only thing that's democratic about it is elections... but where the citizenry is divided into two classes: the politicians, the judges, and the cops who are all above the law and enjoy total impunity, and the rest who are being crushed on a daily basis.

I sadly don't expect much resistance from the ordinary citizen to an authoritarian drift today, simply because they did not experience "the democratic transition" the same way the winners - again, cops, judges, politicians - did.

The ordinary citizen who knows how corrupt the judiciary is and how useless it is to file any legal complaint isn't fooled by the politicians' discourse when any suspicious affair is revealed: "We are confident in the integrity and the independence of the justice system"

There have been enough scandals and instances of abuse to shake empires in the last 10 years in Tunisia. But nobody can name one instance in which justice was indeed served. Puts some perspective on what this pseudo-democracy is worth to ordinary people.