Rights groups have denounced Bin Ali for deteriorating human rights situation in the country.

Additional Reporting By Tamer Abul Einein, IOL Correspondent

TUNIS, November 16, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – UN human rights groups have decried human rights violations and deteriorating situation of freedom of opinion and expression in Tunisia, which hosts a UN summit on the Information Technology and the internet, with rights activists describing the Arab country as "unlikely setting" for the prestigious event.

"When I first heard that the summit was to be held here (Tunisia), I viewed it as a humiliation that the dictatorship should have this chance to present a modern mask to hide its face," Mokhtar Yahyaoui, of the Tunis Center for the Independence of the Judiciary, told Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The US-based rights group said critical online writers have been detained by Tunisian police and Web sites that publish reports of human rights abuses in the country have been blocked.

Citing examples, the group said online Tunisian journalist, Muhammad Abou, was arrested last March after publishing an article on a banned Web site comparing President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The Tunisian journalist is now serving a three-year prison term.

"It continues to flout its national and international legal commitments to free expression, the right to access information and the right to privacy by censoring the Internet (and) imprisoning writers for expressing their views online," the group said.

"Its record on freedom of expression online in practice has led many Tunisian human rights workers to express disbelief that (the summit) will be held in their country," it added in its report on censorship of the Internet by Middle Eastern governments.

HRW researchers and the transatlantic, university-based Open Net Initiative tested access to 1,947 sites from around the world in September and found that 182 of them were blocked to readers in Tunisia.

The blocked Web sites included those of human rights groups, opposition parties, Islamist movements and organizations that provide news about Tunisia.

Hunger-Strike

Tunisians and Swiss gather in solidarity with asylum seekers on hunger strike in protest at rights violations in Tunisia .

Protesting widespread human rights violations in the country, a group of Tunisian political asylum seekers in Geneva have ended a five-day hunger strike on Wednesday, the same day of the opening of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

"Basic freedoms have been violated under this regime, which has been tentatively working to silence opponents and deprive citizens of free speech," Al-Arabi Al-Qassemi, head of Al-Zaytouna rights group, told IslamOnline.net.

"The regime has also banned the right of association in addition to pursuing its inhume detention of people."

Qassemi said the hunger strike was an effort to draw attention to ongoing rights violations in the Arab country.

"The strike was mainly aimed to draw the world attention that such the world summit should not be a reward for the ruling regime."

The opened in Tunis on Wednesday with an agreement that entrenched the US dominance over the domain-name system that guides traffic around the Internet.

Conspicuous among the attendees was Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who arrived on Tuesday, November 15, the first time that an Israeli plane carrying an official delegation has flown directly to the North African country.

Profound Concern

UN human rights envoys also entered the fray, denouncing the deteriorating human rights situation and freedoms of opinion and expression in the North African country, Reuters said.

Hilan Jilani, UN rapporteur on defenders of human rights, Ambeyi Ligabo, rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, and Leandro Despouy, rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, said they had received "numerous reports" of abuses and human rights violations in Tunisia.

Without citing examples, they said they had information about the blocking of streets to prevent meetings and the closing down of lawyers' associations.

They further added that they had information on physical attacks by members of security forces on journalists, lawyers and defenders of human rights.

Rights watchdogs say Tunisian and foreign reporters covering the world summit have been harassed and beaten.

At the weekend, a reporter with the French daily Libération, Christophe Boltanski, who had been investigating the recent beatings of human rights activists in Tunisia, was stabbed and kicked outside his hotel in Tunis.

On Monday, November 14, Belgian public television said one of its crews was harassed and manhandled by police.

Robert Menard, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, has been banned from attending the summit.

"Banning the head of an organization that defends free expression from attending a summit about the information society is absurd and unacceptable," he told Britain's The Independent newspaper.