Tunisia is fighting for freedom

Tunisia is fighting for freedom

Tunesiens President Beji Caid Essebsi wants to develop his country socially and is currently introducing laws to improve the status of women and homosexuals in the country’s parliament. Religious hardliners protest.

Tunisia is fighting for freedom
Photo: Public free / wikimedia

It recalls the protests of right-wing populists against marriage for all in France or evangelical plebiscites against US marriage (Proposition 8). However, Tunisia is not just about queer rights and the repeal of freedoms that have already been achieved, but about a fundamental social change that began in 2011 in the so-called Arab Spring. Hundreds of Tunisians have been led by Islamic clerics on the streets in the past few days to resist the “change of divine words” and to demand “Tunisians abide by the teachings of Islam”.

Despite the demonstrations, Tunisia’s President Beji Caid Essebsi maintains that a bill to strengthen women’s rights should be brought into parliament, further pushing Islamic Sharia law out of state law:

“Men and women are equal before the Constitution, without discrimination,”

Essebsi said of his plans to equate women in inheritance law with men.

In June, the Presidential Commission on the Modernization of Criminal Law published its proposals. The decriminalization of homosexuality is also recommended.

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