authoritarianism in MENA

on May 26 Tebboune stated from the Italian capital, Rome, that Tunisia is facing a political impasse and needs support in reinstating democracy

Tunisia has valid concerns about Algeria raising gas prices in light of the global energy crisis.

Algeria sells gas to Tunisia at preferential prices, and the latter earns a right of passage of 5.25% on the total of Algeria gas transported through Tunisian territory to Italy.

Algeria has expressed concerns over potential Tunisian normalization with Israel despite the fact that Saied had stated during his electoral campaign in 2019 that “normalization with Israel is tantamount to treason.”

Taboubi leads the UGTT, a historically strong and popular union in Tunisia with more than 1 million workers. In an explicit reference to Morocco's normalization with Israel, Taboubi said in his June statements that a campaign to push Arab normalization with Israel aims to pressure Algeria, which leads a campaign to boycott Tel Aviv in the North African region.

Although the opening of the land borders appears to be an indication of the beginning of the recovery of Tunisian-Algerian relations, other measures will need to be in place to guarantee this recovery

Some firm believers still think Saied can deliver those dreams, she said. Others, angry at the political stagnation, now acknowledge they are prioritizing stability over democracy.

The same people who have been disappointed by Ennahda and other politicians over the last decade, he said, cannot claim their dreams have since been realized under Saied either.“At the end of the day now, the choice is between accepting dictatorship and bowing down to it, or to stand up against it and fight it … in a civil way,”

“This is a country where only policemen and the rich live happily,”

The new constitution lacks exactitude, allowing for the prolongation of the president’s term in the event of a “looming danger.” That term, (khatar dahim in Arabic) appears more than once in the new document.  But who would determine whether a danger is looming — or not — other than the president? In other words, the president designed a new constitution which would allow him to violate it for what he considers a “looming danger.”

Saied is now just one among many Arab autocrats, and his hold on power is facilitated by the regional tyrannical order controlled by the U.S. and Gulf regimes.  He dares not offend the Gulf monarchies and refrains from condemning the UAE alliance with Israel.  His top priority is to secure a veneer of electoral legitimacy in a country with falling voter turnouts. 

With Tunisia advancing quickly into autocracy, Lebanon remains the most open country where elections still take place, despite Western protestations at the results when Hizbullah and its allies win seats. 

Warraq is the biggest island on the Nile River in Egypt, where an estimated 100,000 people live and work mostly in fishing and farming. The island of 6.36 square kilometres was once a prosperous farming community, but has become urbanised in recent decades.

In July 2017, one Egyptian was killed and dozens of people, including police officers, were injured in a confrontation on the island over the expulsion orders. Around 35 residents were sentenced to lengthy imprisonments in December 2020 for "preventing authorities from carrying out their duty". Egyptian security services have kept a tight grip over the strategic island, one of 255 islands in Egypt, checking passengers' IDs to and from it by ferries, which link it to Cairo and Qalyubia governorates. Egyptian police consider residents in Warraq Island as squatters who have encroached on state-owned lands.

Egyptian forces demolished a hospital and a youth centre on the island, and destroyed two schools which served 6,500 students.

Early in 2017, Warraq Island was excluded from Egypt's nature reserves list, which paved the way for development projects in the following years. So far, Egyptian authorities have set their sights on almost 2,458 homes.

the government's development plan is to build 94 Manhattan-style residential towers on the island, which includes almost 4,092 housing units. It will also build seven-star hotels, schools, youth centres, shopping malls, two marinas for yachts, a river corniche, and a grand park.

In 2002, Egyptian residents of Warraq Island won a court case which asserted their land ownership, saying that the government owned only 31 acres of the island through the Islamic Waqf.

on 8 October 2019, Shehab responded to a tweet by a verified Saudi account that reports on developments in the kingdom’s infrastructure projects. When the account tweeted about the launch of a new network of buses, she tweeted the word “finally!”.

On official Saudi websites, Kollona Amn – which also has a Twitter account – is described as an app that allows citizens and expatriates to submit security and criminal reports related to personal life attacks, threats, impersonation, extortion, penetration of social media accounts, defamation, fraud and other criminal offences and security reports.

“new phase of digital authoritarianism”.

“It is very concerning because people who post something cannot predict the risk or who is going to report them, and who is going to go back and search their feed for posts that don’t align with government propaganda,”

Recalling her own experience in Syria, Aljizawi described the phenomenon of citizens being unable to trust their own neighbours.“Sometimes people find themselves in trouble. They need a promotion or need to prove their loyalty to the state, so they do something like this. It’s enough to just take a screenshot and report it,”

in the hands of a dictatorship targeting human rights defenders, technology transforms into a terrifying tool which fast tracks repression

Shehab would regularly tweet to support the rights of others but believed it went unnoticed because she did not have many Twitter followers.“She [would] always stand with all human rights in Saudi or outside of Saudi

Shehab, who has been studying in the UK since 2017, was not especially critical of the government and was a supporter of Vision 2030, Prince Mohammed’s plan to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil and towards services such as health and tourism.

The Egyptian authorities’ efforts to screen out prominent organisations with a record of criticising their rule, particularly on the issue of human rights, comes amid growing concern over their treatment of protests and civil society at the Cop in Sharm el-Sheikh in November.

The UNFCCC told the Guardian host nations were permitted to invite organisations at their discretion for one-time access, but that “there is no fixed written policy” on one-time registration. The UK did not recommend any NGOs for one-time admission to attend Cop26.

The secretariat does not consider itself to be competent to unilaterally identify additional organisations from the host country

Abdallah said the Egyptian government wished to use Cop27 “to portray a different image of Egypt, one where people are kept away from cities suffering from pollution, poverty or repression. Part of this image is keeping critical voices out so that the only ones heard in Sharm el-Sheikh are those praising the government.”

Since coming to power in a military coup in 2013, Sisi has moved to strangle civil society activity. The state has demanded that NGOs receive government approval to continue operating and has outlawed funding received from abroad as a way to curtail their operations.

Organisations tracking detentions by security services, use of torture by state bodies or the state’s crackdown on civil rights have found their offices raided, their founders targeted with asset freezes and travel bans or their premises forcibly closed by the authorities.

Abdallah told the Guardian the ECRF had applied to attend Cop27 not just to represent Egyptian citizens but also to provide legal assistance in Sharm el-Sheikh to anyone detained for protesting.“Not allowing ECRF to attend strips participants from our protection, meaning protection from a watchdog organisation that can actually support them,” he said. “No one else is doing this.”

Climate justice activists have said Egypt should not be allowed to host Cop27 while thousands of prisoners of conscience remain behind bars, particularly the British-Egyptian activist and blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah, now more than four months into a hunger strike. Abd El-Fattah, imprisoned on terrorism charges for a social media post, told his family during a recent visit that he believed he would die in prison.

There are more than 6.5 million internet and social media users in Jordan, the majority of whom are youth, out of a population of roughly 11 million. Jordanians are avid social media users, and over the years have used Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms to share news not broadcast on state-controlled channels, jokes targeting the regime, and rumors about the myriad political and corruption scandals circulating across the country on a regular basis

Cybercrimes Law No. 27/2015 is a popular regime tool used to control expression online. Article 11 regulates expression on online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. In April 2019, parliament introduced amendments to the law to criminalize the act of spreading “rumors” and “hate speech,” extending to the use of private messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The latest amendments define hate speech as “every writing and every speech or action intended to provoke sectarian or racial sedition, advocate for violence, or foster conflict between followers of different religions and various components of the nation.” And under the cybercrime law, Jordanians will face a criminal penalty if they are convicted of “sending or resending or disseminating information through the Internet or website or any information system that includes defamation, slander or libel against any person.” Between 2019 and 2020, the cases brought under the cybercrime law exceeded two thousand, more than double the number from the year before. In 2022, there have been more arrests under charges of “spreading false news,” including the detentions of several high-profile journalists.

Even the Jordanian National Center for Human Rights, a semi-governmental organization, wrote in its own recent annual report that “the detention of individuals for what they express is continuing.” Alarmingly, a recent Citizen Lab and Front Line Defenders joint report confirmed that two operators, “likely agencies of the Jordanian government,” used the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of at least four Jordanians, including a human rights defender, a lawyer, and a journalist. 

Loosely formed groups of youth activists, often described with the term hirak (“movement”), organize in various neighborhoods and towns across Jordan around shared issues. In 2019, a workshop looking at youth activism across the Middle East and North Africa found that youth activism does not adhere to formalized structures of organizing, such as political parties, professional associations, and civil society organizations.

we have seen youth movements in the past decade break the generations-old divisions of urban versus rural and West Bank versus East Bank

organizing around their shared frustrations over unchecked levels of corruption, perpetual over-education combined with underemployment, and restrictions on what they can write on social media or when they can gather.

the attitudes of ruling elites and public officials toward youth are dismissive

the many initiatives launched over the years have not ever been driven by local youth demands, but rather have been top-down, buzzword-filled projects, centralized within the newly created Ministry of Youth, with little to no popular support or participation