Enhancing Detainees Rights in Tunisia

This project seeks to enhance detainees rights in Tunisia by expanding access to legal aid and improving enforcement of detainee rights in Tunisia. In 2016, Tunisia passed wide-ranging reforms of its Criminal Procedure Code (CPC). Act 2016-5 (Law 5) enacting article 13 of the CPC gave arrestees in police custody the right to legal counsel and significantly reduced the duration of legal pre-charge detention from 72 to 48 hours. By the order of public prosecutor and when justified, pre-charge detention could be extended with 48 hours for felonies and 24 hours for misdemeanors. In parallel, the anti-terrorism law of 2015 allows prosecutors and police to hold suspects for the first 48 hours without access to a lawyer and extends the duration of pre-charge custody to five days extendable two times for a total of 15 days. Since Law 5 came into force, its application has been uneven. This project seeks to ensure that the rights granted to civilians in Tunisia by Law 5 and criminal procedures proposing alternatives to detention, inter alia, bail provisions, are enforced consistently during the pre-trial phase.