Over the past three years, Tunisian authorities have adopted migration and asylum policies that utterly disregard the lives, safety and dignity of refugees and migrants and are used as a tool of racialized exclusion. Officials carry out life-threatening collective expulsions in violation of the principle of non-refoulement, following often reckless sea interceptions or racially targeted arrests, frequently accompanied by torture and other ill-treatment, including dehumanizing sexual violence. Access to asylum has been suspended, while organisations providing protection to refugees and migrants have faced severe repression. Tunisia is therefore neither a place of safety for disembarkation nor a “safe third country” for the transfer of asylum seekers.
Since 2024, the European Union and its member states have celebrated a steep drop in sea arrivals from Tunisia while reinforcing migration cooperation with the government without effective human rights safeguards, entrapping refugees and migrants in situations where their lives and rights are at risk.
Tunisian authorities must end advocacy of racism and xenophobia and protect refugees and migrants from unlawful arrest and detention, racial profiling, torture and other ill-treatment and collective expulsions. The European Union must overhaul its migration cooperation with Tunisia to ensure it upholds refugee protection and prevents complicity in human rights violations and anti-Black racism.