TUNIS — The Tunisian association Aswat Nissa (Voix de Femmes) will launch on 12 August what it describes as the country's first digital platform dedicated to recording and documenting femicides, presented alongside its third annual report on the killing of women, covering 2025.

The organisation says the platform is intended to centralise case information, make the data accessible to researchers, journalists and civil society organisations, and improve the monitoring of a phenomenon whose true scale remains difficult to establish. It cites three reasons for building it: the continuation of the killings, the insufficiency of official statistics, and the persistence of impunity.

According to figures documented by the association, the number of femicides it has been able to record rose from six in 2018 to 25 in 2023, 26 in 2024 and 30 in 2025. The 2025 report follows editions covering 2023 and 2024.

The presentation is scheduled for 10:00 in Tunis in the presence of institutional actors, civil society representatives and specialists in women's rights. It falls on the eve of National Women's Day, marked in Tunisia every 13 August.

What a civil-society database implies

The significance of the launch is partly what it measures and partly who is doing the measuring.

Tunisia adopted Organic Law No. 58 of 2017 on eliminating violence against women, an instrument that was widely regarded at the time as among the most comprehensive in the region. It created reporting obligations, specialised police units and protection mechanisms. What it did not produce is a published, regularly updated public count of women killed. In the absence of that, the reference figures circulating in Tunisian debate — the ones cited by parliamentarians, journalists and researchers alike — come from an association operating on project funding.

That has a practical consequence for policy. Prevention systems are calibrated on data: where killings cluster geographically, what proportion of victims had previously filed a complaint, how many held a protection order, how long the interval was between the first reported incident and the death. Those variables determine whether the failure sits with the police, the courts, the shelter network or the law itself. A count maintained outside the state can establish that women are dying; it is much harder for it to establish where the chain of protection broke.

Reading the numbers carefully

The trend line in Aswat Nissa's tally — six documented cases in 2018, thirty in 2025 — should be read with a caveat the association itself flags in framing the platform. Documented cases are not the same as total cases. Part of the rise reflects the association's own expanding capacity to identify, verify and archive incidents that in earlier years would have been reported only as isolated news items, if at all. The figures measure both a phenomenon and the growing effort to see it.

That is precisely the argument for a permanent, structured database rather than an annual report: a stable methodology applied over years is what allows a genuine trend to be separated from improved detection.

What comes next

Aswat Nissa presents the platform as a tool for accountability — better documentation, more accessible data, and advocacy for prevention and protection mechanisms it judges more effective than those currently in place. Whether it becomes a reference or a parallel record depends largely on the response of the institutions in the room on 12 August, and on whether the public bodies holding case files choose to feed them into a count they do not control.