Rights groups have condemned the trial as politically motivated.

xParis: Fifteen years after an uprising toppled Tunisia's autocratic leader and sparked the Arab Spring, analysts say the current president is burying democracy by jailing opponents and suing activists and lawyers. Kais Saied was elected in a landslide victory in 2019, riding a wave of disaffection at the lack of political and economic progress following the revolution. However, two years later he staged a power grab and later began a rollback of freedoms. "Unfortunately, we have gone from a dysfunctional democracy to an equally dysfunctional authoritarian regime," Hamza Meddeb, a fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told AFP. Meddeb himself was sentenced in absentia to 33 years in prison on charges of conspira

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