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نواة في دقيقة: مذكّرة وزارة الصحة، إجراء تنظيمي أم حجب للمعلومة؟

أصدرت وزارة الصحّة يوم 16 أفريل مذكّرة حول كيفيّة تعامل إطاراتها وأعوانها مع وسائل الإعلام ومواقع التواصل الاجتماعي حدّدت فيها القائمة الحصريّة للهياكل المخوّل لها الإدلاء بتصريحات وهدّدت من خلالها المخالفين لهذا الإجراء بإجراءات تأديبيّة وجزائيّة. لقيت هذه المذكّرة رفضا واسعا من مهنيّي قطاع الصحّة لما في ذلك من اعتداء على حريّة التعبير حسب قولهم. وقد برّر وزير الصحّة على هامش جلسة عامّة منعقدة بالبرلمان بتاريخ 19 أفريل 2021 بأنّ المسألة تنظيميّة بحتة للحدّ من تداول المعلومات المغالطة.

Tunisia: A new campaign for a better internet

Complaining about expensive prices and bad services is definitely the most repeated talk anyone would hear in Tunisia and the internet is no longer excluded. In fact, internet is not only a tool to gather people for a cause, organize boycott campaigns or even protests. Internet and more precisely slow internet and its cost became the subject of the protest today.

US State Department – Working for or Against a Pluralistic and Free Media in Tunisia?

The agitation that a democratic model allows represents a prompt for open, substantial discussion, create space for questions to form and answers to be formulated, for awareness to shift and public opinion to fluctuate and controversy to take its course … For over a decade, Nawaat has been a platform many of whose contributors are quick to question, criticize, and call out the Tunisian and foreign governments for hypocrisy, complicity, exploit, corruption…the very symptoms of defective governance that were renounced by youth and activists and journalists of the so-called Arab Spring, the same individuals whom Western democracies and international agencies have so effusively commended for their courage and commitment to changing the status quo. And so inevitably it feels like something of a betrayal when requests for more specific information and questions regarding political motives are consistently held at bay, excluded from discussions, or, most conveniently, ignored.

Counterterrorism Law: looking beyond laxity vs. despotism, security vs. human rights

Amidst the distilled information and tones of alarmism and pessimism that stifle quality discussions on terrorism in mainstream media, one finds the insight and information provided by members of civil society, activists, government officials active on social media platforms. Such a plurality of perspectives is important for fleshing out and expanding a discussion that is commonly portrayed as a two-sided debate between human rights advocates who demand the protection of civil liberties at the expense of effective security measures, and conservative political figures whose rhetoric of national security and unity in the face of terrorism is construed to harbor power and by extension repress fundamental rights.