TUNIS — The executive bureau of the National Union of Tunisian Journalists presented its activity report on Friday to the second ordinary session of the union's general assembly, covering January 2025 to July 2026 and describing a period marked by what the document calls a "deterioration of the climate of freedoms."

The report, summarised by La Presse and by Directinfo, reviews the union's work in three areas: the defence of press freedom, the protection of journalists' professional and social rights, and the monitoring of violations against the profession. It is now before the assembly's delegates for discussion and for the adoption of recommendations.

Two crises at once

The picture the SNJT draws is of a sector squeezed from two directions at the same time.

The first is legal. The bureau says it spent the eighteen months tracking the files of journalists facing prosecution or held in detention. It renews its call for decree-laws 115 and 116 — the texts that govern the print and broadcast sectors — to be applied, and repeats its demand that several pieces of legislation be revised, singling out decree-law 54 on the dissemination of false information.

The second is economic, and in the union's telling it is doing quieter damage. The report records continued closures of media outlets, dismissals of journalists, repeated delays in the payment of salaries, and persistent job insecurity that falls hardest on freelancers and on staff hired under contracts that do not comply with existing labour law.

The two are connected. A newsroom that cannot pay its staff on time has little capacity to defend them in court, and a reporter on an irregular contract has less protection when a complaint is filed.

The external measure

The union's assessment tracks with the international one. In Reporters Without Borders' 2026 index, published in April, Tunisia ranked 137th of 180 countries, down eight places from 129th the previous year, with its score falling from 43.48 to 40.43. Six years earlier, in 2020, the country stood at 72nd.

RSF attributed the slide to a combination of factors: the weakening of institutional checks under the 2022 constitution, decree-law 54 as an instrument capable of restricting expression, newsroom dependence on advertising revenue, and an increasingly hostile environment including online smear campaigns and legal harassment.

What the union is asking for

The SNJT's own remedies are narrow and specific rather than sweeping. It wants the existing media framework — decree-laws 115 and 116 — enforced rather than replaced, and it wants decree-law 54 reopened. On the economic side, its demands turn on enforcement of labour law inside media companies: contracts that comply with the code, salaries paid on schedule, and an end to the practice of employing journalists indefinitely on precarious terms.

Over the reporting period, the bureau says it used protest rallies, workplace visits, case monitoring and public statements to press those points. Whether the coming session translates them into a binding set of recommendations — and whether any of it reaches the statute book — is the question the assembly now has in front of it.