A Paris appeals court has refused to extradite Halima Ben Ali, daughter of Tunisia’s late deposed president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to face financial crime charges in Tunisia. The court said the decision rested on Tunisia’s failure to provide guarantees that she would be tried before an independent and impartial tribunal.
Halima Ben Ali was arrested in September while about to board a flight from Paris to Dubai at Tunisia’s request. Tunisian authorities accuse her of laundering assets allegedly acquired during her father’s rule from 1987 to 2011. The charges carry a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
Her lawyer, Samia Maktouf, had argued that extradition would amount to “a death sentence.” After the appeals court ruling, Maktouf described the decision as an “immense relief” and said it represented a measure of justice, according to Jeune Afrique.
The arrest was part of a broader, renewed Tunisian effort to recover assets believed to have been misappropriated by the former ruling family and to pursue accountability more than a decade after the 2011 uprisings that toppled Ben Ali. Those protests, the first of the Arab Spring, forced the longtime leader into exile amid widespread public anger over corruption, inequality and media censorship.
Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia during the unrest and died in exile in 2019 at the age of 83. He was later sentenced in absentia by a Tunisian court to life imprisonment, a sentence he did not serve.