Tunisia: French student detained for weeks, flies back home

Tunisia has released a French Phd Student. The announcement was made Friday (Nov. 15) by the French ministry.

Victor Dupont, who researches social movements, youth unemployment and Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, was one of three French nationals arrested on Oct. 19.

At least two were subsequently released. The whereabouts of the third person, a woman with dual French-Tunisian citizenship, weren’t immediately clear Friday.

“……. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, together with the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, as well as our embassy and consulate in Tunis, have been closely monitoring his situation since his arrest, and even though he has now been released, they remain mobilised with the follow-ups of this case,” Christophe Lemoine, French Foreign Ministry spokesperson told reporters.

Dupont travelled to Tunisia to conduct interviews for his research.

He was arrested less than two weeks after his arrival and was presented to a military court in the city of Le Kef.

Reports have sugested he was arrested for allegedly undermining national security.

Dupont’s supporters, both at his university and in associations representing academics who work in the Middle East and North Africa, said that his research didn’t pose any security risks, called the charges unfounded and decried authorities’ choice to charge him in military court.

“It has no connection with foreign powers or foreign affairs and presents no threat whatsoever to the security of the Tunisian state. Rather, Dupont’s arrest highlights the constraints on academic freedom in Tunisia today and poses a dangerous precedent for the future of social scientific investigation in the country,” Asli Bali, Yale Law School professor and president of the Middle East Studies Association, wrote in a Nov. 9 letter to authorities.

Th 27-year-old is a free man since Tuesday (Nov.12). He returned home on Friday (Nov. 15).

Nor French authorities nor Tunisian officials have commented on the reason for his arrest.

NGOs have repeatedly denounced a curtailing of rights and freedoms under President Kais Saied

Though foreign researchers are regularly surveilled while working in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, such arrests and charges against them are rare. In 2016, Giulio Regeni, an Italian Ph.D. student researching trade unions in Cairo, was found dead near a highway and marked with signs of torture. After an investigation, Italian prosecutors are trying four Egyptian security officials in absentia in Rome.