On May 11, 2024, Mourad Zghidi was arrested after a group of police officers of the Anti-Crime Unit in El Gorjani went to his house. He was taken to the headquarters of the aforementioned squad for interrogation.

According to the victim’s lawyer, Mourad was interrogated immediately after his arrest for approximately five hours. The questions were about his political and social analyses on one of the radio programs in which he regularly appears, as well as the content of a post he had published on his personal social media page, through which he expressed his solidarity with journalist Mohammed Boughalleb. Additionally,  his phone and laptop have been seized to complete the investigation. Later that same day, the public prosecution authorized the detention of Mourad Zghidi for 48 hours pending investigation. On May 13, 2024, he was presented to the public prosecution at the Court of First Instance in Tunis, which in turn decided to extend his detention for an additional 48 hours.

After the end of the period of the pre-trial detention, the investigating judge of the Court of First Instance in Tunis 1 decided to issue an arrest warrant against the journalist. A hearing was scheduled for May 22, 2024, to present the victim of the violation before the judiciary.

On May 22, 2024, Mourad Zghidi was brought before the judiciary, and at the end of the hearing, the Criminal Chamber of the Court of First Instance in Tunis sentenced journalist Mourad Zghidi to six months in prison for deliberately using information and communication networks and systems to produce, promote, publish, send, and prepare fake news and rumors to infringe on the rights of others and harm public security, as well as using of Information systems and the dissemination of news that include false information aiming at defaming and slandering others, and causing them material and moral harm.

On July 30,2024, the court of appeal in Tunisia has issued a ruling, condemning journalist “Mourad Zeghidi” to a term of eight months in prison with a suspended sentence.

Human Rights Violations:

The prison sentence against journalist Mourad Zghidi comes in light of the victim exercising his right to freedom of opinion and expression through the digital space or the radio station where he works. Such trials and charges related to the dissemination of rumors and other legal texts that suppress freedom of expression constitute transgressions of this right. Besides, it first represents an infringement upon the human rights system, as the imprisonment of Mourad Zghidi for media posts or statements that came within the framework of his work as a journalist constitutes a violation of the text of the Tunisian constitution, which guarantees freedom of opinion and expression, which as stipulated in Article 37, which states that “Freedom of opinion, thought, expression, media, and publication is guaranteed”. Furthermore, per Article 22, the state guarantees citizens rights and individual and collective freedoms and provides