Observing the National Constituent Assembly Amira YAHAYOUI Interview with UNDP No Power Without Checks and Balances Before the R

Observing the National Constituent Assembly Amira YAHAYOUI Interview with UNDP No power without checks and balances Before the revolution, I was part of the opposition to the Ben Ali regime, and we were always demanding the same thing: checks and balances on the regime's power. At the time, the government was a dictatorial power, and checks and balances were impossible. After the revolution, when we held the elections and set up the National Constituent Assembly, the fact that we had elected the ruling power democratically, through free elections, eliminated that necessity. Everything took place as if the demand for checks and balances was no longer important, and as if, in the name of the rules of democracy, people had forgotten what we had learned before. As far as I was concerned, there was a clear need to create checks and balances, to observe, to make information available to everyone, to archive, monitor and hold to account. That is why I created Al-Bawsala, or "the Compass". I was still living in Paris at the time, but the organization was created in Tunis. Al-Bawsala's initial raison d'être was not parliamentary transparency, but rather the need to push for a human rights agenda in the constitution. When Al-Bawsala was created, it was not a monitoring association, but a human rights association. But very quickly, everything changed: after a few days in the parliament, the project evolved. I very quickly realized that no one knew what was going on in the assembly, that no one knew its operating rules and no one was taking part in it apart from the 217 elected Assembly members, and even they weren't largely present at the time. When the National Constituent Assembly started meeting after the elections of 23 October 2011, it did so without transparency, without communicating about its work. Granted, the plenary sessions were broadcast live on national television, but most of the work that went into drafting the Constitution took place in the committees, whose meetings were not televised. The Assembly members were not reporting back to citizens. What is more, the citizens did not know who these Assembly members, charged with drafting the new constitution, were. Some Assembly members, the best known, had a Wikipedia entry, appeared on television, were invited on the radio, etc., but most of them were unknown to the general public. There was no systematized information platform for the 217 Assembly members. We didn't even know if they were voting in line with the ideas they had defended during the campaign. And we didn't know if they were still members of their parties or if they had changed allegiance, with many members switching parties or parliamentary groups. This way of doing things seemed to me to be quite simply suicidal. The Assembly members had to be urged to answer to the citizens, and that is why our project took a new direction. At that point, there were lots and lots of NGOs, associations and members of civil society working on topics and making proposals on the content of the constitution. Some focused on women's rights, others on the media, on freedom of speech... I thought that instead of working on topics, on the content, I would work on the form: the structures and the methods. I thought that that would be a more impactful way to proceed and a good way to get into the subject. In fact, as we began to work on the form, on the operation of the Assembly and the practices of Assembly members, we ended up, with the Marsad project team and the Al-Bawsala office, working very closely on many substantive matters. We met two objectives: firstly, we enabled people to be informed on what was going on, 1 and researchers and professors relied heavily on our work and our publications; and secondly, we convinced the Assembly members of our positions on human rights. It was a matter of keeping a record of events and making them accessible, but it was also about pushing our agenda. Building democracy on solid foundations The first difficulty we encountered was in getting the Assembly members to understand that they were not above us, but below us. We had to patiently explain to the Assembly members what public service meant, to show them that their role was to serve the citizens. Being an elected member of parliament isn't about doing what you want; it is about doing what the citizens want. They needed to understand what "representing" meant, and that "representing" someone was not at all the same as "having power over" someone. It was difficult, but that is only natural; we were emerging from a fifty-year dictatorship, and before that, there had been the subject of colonization; Tunisia had never been democratic. What was difficult was making sure that the foundations on which Tunisia was to be built after the revolution were sound and stable. It was for those reasons that we were extremely rigorous in our behaviour with the Assembly members; it was crucial that we never show that we were in a position of weakness, even though sometimes we were. We never showed that we were daunted by the institution, even if we were. We had to present ourselves as their equals, as citizens whom they were meant to be serving. Entering the Assembly The first thing to do was to get into the Assembly. At that point, I found myself quite isolated. We were quite shocked by the small number of civil society activists present at the Assembly's first sessions. Tunisian civil society was not accustomed to entering institutions and places of power, and the revolution had not changed that. Civil society's place continued to be the street, and the number of mobilizations was truly impressive: the associations organized demonstrations with thousands of people, civil society created national and international pressure; it managed to keep up substantial media pressure throughout the constitution-making process. And yet, the overwhelming majority of these associations and NGOs did not enter the institutions. The only ones to enter the Assembly were those who were used to doing so: the two trade unions, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) and the Tunisian Union for Industry, Commerce and Crafts (UTICA), which were accustomed to interacting with the public authorities. Civil society therefore had little presence in the Assembly. I realized this when we were criticized for being the only ones to have access to the Assembly. It wasn't true: we were the only ones to have access to the Assembly because we were the only ones who had requested access from the relevant authorities. Very few associations had asked to be accredited by the Assembly. The list of requests was much shorter than the list of people who said they couldn't get in. We started to come to the Assembly every day, and at first we had an easy relationship with the members, until, that is, we published information on the position of one member, which caused problems within the parliamentary groups. That was when we encountered resistance for the first time. The Assembly members tried to drive us out by manipulating the rules of procedure. We were forbidden from entering the Assembly, under the pretext that only journalists were allowed to observe the constituent committees and to follow the work in its entirety. It was for that reason that we recruited Meriem, a journalist, who had a press card. She got press cards for all our team members. We had to stand firm and refuse to negotiate. It was essential to make the Assembly's members and President understand that they could not keep us out. During that episode, we beat them at their own game: it wasn't about getting around the ban; it was a way of showing them that, 2 whatever happened, press card or no press card, we would be there. At that point, they realized that it was futile to ban us from coming. At the beginning, I was on my own, and soon there were three of us: Emna, who was working with me on the project, and Sélim, who looked after the administrative and financial aspect. My brother Nabil helped us set up the site, then we started to recruit a few people, such as Meriem. Ghada – who became the leader of the Marsad Majles project – joined us a year later. Being accepted by the politicians Our relationship with the Assembly, and particularly with its presidency, remained very complicated. I knew some of the members from the Ben Ali era, and they supported the project. However, the vast majority of members supported us until we published something that might backfire on them. When what we published was in their interests, they considered us as allies, but each time what we published was to their detriment, we once again became an enemy to be defeated. Things continued in that vein until March 2016, when, for the first time, what we published was not attacked by the party concerned. When we wrote about the irregularities in Samia Abbou's voting record, her party, Attayar Democrati, apologised, saying that we were right. However, it took us five years to get to that stage. With the president of the Assembly, it was worse still. I very quickly found myself at war with Mustapha Ben Jaafar. I threatened him in his office, which he took very badly. The fact that I had known him since I was ten years old made it even more shocking for him.

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