TUNIS — The speaker of Tunisia's Assembly of the Representatives of the People, Brahim Bouderbala, told deputies on Wednesday that using a mobile phone to photograph or film inside the chamber is strictly forbidden and that anyone who does so will be referred immediately to the public prosecutor.

"It is strictly forbidden, from anywhere in the hall, to use a phone to take photographs or to film," Bouderbala said, according to remarks reported by Business News and L'Économiste Maghrébin. "Anyone who breaches this ban will be referred immediately to the public prosecutor's office."

Within hours, sixteen members of the assembly — among them Nouri Jridi, Bothaina Ghanmi and Basma Manaï — issued a joint statement contesting the ruling's legality, Business News and Webdo reported. Their central argument was a principle of criminal law: there is no offence and no penalty without a text. A restriction on how deputies behave in the hemicycle, they said, cannot be created by an announcement from the chair, and its enforcement through the criminal courts amounts to an infringement of the assembly's independence.

What the ban actually closes off

The practical significance lies in what the phones were being used for. Clips filmed by deputies from their seats had become one of the few independent windows onto plenary proceedings, Business News noted — the raw footage that circulated when a session turned heated, a quorum looked thin, or a minister failed to appear.

The timing sharpens the point. The chamber has spent the past fortnight trying to compel the executive to answer for the country's electricity and water cuts: its industry, trade, natural resources, energy and environment committee has called for a hearing with the minister overseeing energy and the head of the state utility STEG, and a parliamentary session devoted to the outages went ahead without the government present. That is precisely the kind of sitting whose empty benches are documented by a phone camera rather than by an official feed.

Several commentators, including L'Économiste Maghrébin, pointed to an irony in the sequence: this assembly's majority backed Decree-Law 54, the text under which citizens have been prosecuted over social media posts. Journalists and jurists quoted by Business News described the new ban as a worrying drift in the same direction.

Where this could go

The deputies who objected framed the remedy in procedural terms: any rule governing members' conduct belongs in the assembly's standing orders, amended by the assembly itself, rather than in a ruling from the chair backed by the prosecutor.

A second route exists, and parliaments elsewhere have taken it. Where the official record is complete — uninterrupted broadcast of every sitting, published transcripts, an archive the public can search — private filming loses its purpose, because nothing depends on it. Tunisia's assembly has the means to make that choice. As of Thursday, it had not.