Chapter 3 Lawyers Mobilizing in the Tunisian Uprising: A Matter of ‘generations’?
In: Protests and Generations: Legacies and Emergences in the Middle East, North Africa and the MediterraneanSearch for other papers by Éric Gobe in
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During the reign of President Ben Ali, the legal profession experienced a continuous and quasi-exponential growth of its work force. In 2010, nearly 75% of lawyers were under 40 years old. This bar of young lawyers or trainees registered at the Court of Appeal’s the essence of what we may call the ‘bottom rung’ of Tunisia. Compared to other segments of the profession, these young lawyers (25–35 years old) received the lowest fees from a clientele of modest conditions, and they were exposed to the growing shift between the representation of their profession and the reality of its exercise, which generated a sense of a relative deprivation. This sentiment was also fueled by the privileges enjoyed by the lawyers who were active members of the ruling party (rcd – Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique) patronized by the Ben Ali regime. These professionals enjoyed a quasi-monopoly of litigations occurring in public administration and corporations. In exchange for these material benefits, they were charged by governments to monitor and counter the collective actions of their colleagues. The general conditions of young lawyers at the bottom of the income scale made them receptive to the actions carried out by lawyers and political activists opposed to the regime, well before the outbreak of uprising of Sidi Bouzid. The first ‘cercle’ of the opponents to the regime are lawyers, relatively old (over 50 years) who developed a highly transgressive militant activity in the continuation of a political career marked by their socialization and their prior militant mobilizations under Bourguiba. These lawyers have thus extended an oppositional practice to the extreme left or affiliated with political Islam in the context of their work as lawyers. To them should be added a second cercle, composed by younger lawyers, who were in their forties and enrolled in less transgressive activism. They were Arab nationalists, members of small groups of the radical left, Islamists, or human rights activists. They pursued their activist work as lawyers and defenders of union members and/or political activists. Moreover, they mobilized against lawyers who were members of the rcd, during the elections of the Bar Association and the Tunisian Association of Young Lawyers (atja). These activist lawyers became the spokespersons and the defenders of the material demands of the lower bar while endorsing the values displayed by the profession (invocation of human rights and fundamental freedoms, advocating the right of self-defense). Ultimately, these two cercles of activists have helped initiate or stimulate various mobilizations of their younger colleagues of the lower bar in December 2010-January 2011. This chapter examines how the protests against the regime drew collective actions of young lawyers supervised by older colleagues who have accumulated a militant know-how that has enabled them to be the operators of particularly effective mobilizations.