TUNIS — Rached Ghannouchi, the 85-year-old leader of the opposition Ennahdha party, ended a five-day hunger strike and a parallel refusal of his medication on Tuesday 10 August, his defence committee said, after the medical team treating him in hospital asked him to stop.

The committee said the administration of Mornaguia civil prison had informed his lawyers that Ghannouchi accepted to lift the protest, which he had begun on 6 August. Ennahdha said in a statement that it welcomed its president's decision to follow medical advice, citing his age and chronic conditions.

The party did not treat the matter as closed. It demanded that the authorities end what it called the "isolation imposed by the justice minister," restore his legal right to receive visits from his lawyers and his family, and release him, describing his detention — now in its fourth year — as arbitrary. Ennahdha said it held the authorities responsible for any further deterioration in his health and had begun legal proceedings against "all those responsible for this situation."

The justice ministry and the prison authorities had not publicly responded to the party's account in the reports consulted for this article.

What the strike was about

Ghannouchi has been held since April 2023. A hunger strike by a detainee of his age is, in practical terms, a communication tool of last resort: it is the only lever available to someone who cannot hold a press conference and whose lawyers say they cannot reliably reach him. That it was accompanied by a refusal of medication — the more dangerous half of the protest for a man with chronic illness — indicates how the defence team assessed its options.

The immediate grievance is access, not the conviction itself. His family and lawyers reported an eleven-day blackout after he collapsed in prison on 17 July, and the demands published on Tuesday repeat the same point: visits, and a lawyer in the room.

The gap the case exposes

Tunisian law and the prison regulations provide for lawyer and family visits, and for medical care. The dispute is not about whether those rights exist on paper but about who verifies that they are applied, and how quickly. At present, the account of what is happening inside Mornaguia reaches the public almost exclusively through the detainee's own lawyers, and is met with silence rather than a contrary official account. That asymmetry is what turns a medical question into a political one.

It also carries a risk the state has no interest in running. Ghannouchi is 85. Any deterioration in custody would be attributed to the authorities by default, precisely because no independent record exists to say otherwise.

What would settle the factual dispute

The instruments that would resolve this are already in Tunisian law. The National Authority for the Prevention of Torture (INPT), created in 2013, has a statutory mandate to make unannounced visits to places of detention and to publish its findings; an INPT visit and report on Ghannouchi's conditions and medical file would replace competing statements with a verifiable record.

Beyond that, prison and health authorities can publish periodic medical bulletins for high-profile detainees, as is standard practice in several European systems — a narrow disclosure that answers the health question without touching the case file. Human rights organisations that have followed the file have consistently asked for the same two things: independent medical assessment, and unimpeded access to counsel.

Neither requires a change in the law. Both would remove the state's dependence on a single, contested source of information about a prisoner whose health has become a national political issue.