Equality + Vision = My Tunisia

Preliminary Remarks

When I was asked to write a journalistic profile of Yosra Frawes, I hesitated for a long time.

How to describe Yosra, how to write about her?

A writing sample, an essay that cannot help but be subjective.

Be prepared: I’m going to introduce you to Yosra Frawes—the woman, the poet, the lawyer, and the women’s rights activist.

It’s not particularly difficult to find traces of Yosra online.

She’s no stranger to Google and Wikipedia.

Until recently, her Facebook profile was freely accessible to all internet users.

Twitter and Instagram aren’t really her thing.

Her phone number is publicly available; journalists and interviewees can contact her at any time.

With her winning smile, her charisma, and her deep voice, she draws a seemingly endless circle of friends and kindred spirits around her.

Tunisian journalist and human rights defender Souhayr Belhassen, former president and current honorary president of the Fédération Internationale des Droits Humains (FIDH), says of her: “Yosra is the pride of us all! She embodies the continuation of our struggle for human rights—and above all, women’s rights—in Tunisia and beyond its borders… With her comprehensive education, acquired within both Arab and Francophone cultural spheres, and her charisma, she has become a voice for the cause of human rights. She has had a decisive influence on young people’s activism. Yosra Frawes is a person of great personal integrity and diplomatic skill who knows how to advocate for her convictions and positions. This makes her a key figure today for human rights—and women’s rights in particular.”

The Portrait

To get a sense of her inner self, to feel her essence, one must literally “tear her away” from her work and her daily efforts as an activist. It was she who had chosen the location for our conversation. On this autumn day, the city of Tunis, as hoped, shows itself at its best, bathed in bright sunlight.

She had invited me to come to “Cebalet Ben Ammar,” a few kilometers from Tunis, where the beauty of the landscape is simply breathtaking. At one of the local farms, we sat down in the middle of the large courtyard. In the background, a few horses graze in a pasture. The owner has renovated the farmstead and turned it into a refuge for anyone seeking to escape the noise of the capital.

Before I open my laptop at the start of the interview, she asks me to take a deep breath—the country air, “isn’t it inspiring?” she adds, raising her hands toward the sky as if she were about to recite one of her poems or deliver a speech.

When she speaks, she often stretches out one or both hands toward the sky, toward the audience, or toward the person she’s talking to—not only to receive positive energy, but also, and above all, to give free rein to the emotions that sweep her away during each of her public appearances.

Equality: Still Much to Be Done

At school, she doesn’t yet understand why the women’s issue preoccupies her so much. However, she remembers very clearly the day when, even back then, she exclaimed loudly and clearly: “Women have every right to work. Just like men!” They were standing together in a group in the schoolyard when a classmate declared that he was against women working. In his household, he said, the woman stays at home. “I’m the one who goes to work!”

This is Yosra’s first impassioned speech, bursting forth here. She, whose mother—in a thoroughly patriarchal environment—is solely responsible for caring for the family and providing for herself and her children. “In our family, it’s my mom who works so that my sisters and I can go to school!” Yosra exclaims, quickly dividing her classmates into two groups: in one line stand the children who advocate for women’s economic independence, and in the other, those who oppose it.

There were more opponents than supporters. However, this experience in the schoolyard shaped her for the rest of her life. From then on, she would resolutely advocate for women’s right to work. As a teenager, her resolve to fight for equality solidified; she was finally determined from the day she promised her mother, Assya, that she would become a lawyer and join the Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates (ATFD) as an activist.

After graduating from high school, she enrolled in the Faculty of Law, Political Science, and Social Sciences (FSJPST) at the University of Tunis and eventually joined the ATFD. She completed her studies with a master’s degree in business law and a master’s degree in law. The topic of her thesis for her legal clerkship was marriage under Tunisian law, exploring the tension between “contract and institution.” In the midst of a conservative society, Yosra dared to advocate for the recognition of unmarried couples and single parents and for their legal equality with married couples.

Equality: The Time Is Right

During her studies, she developed her left-wing political convictions, became involved in the student union network, and became an active member of the ATFD’s youth organization. There, she took a particular interest in the Committee to Combat Violence, where she advocated for solidarity-based support and counseling for women who are victims of domestic violence.

This service, run by ATFD activists, provides psychological and legal support to women affected by violence. In 2018, she took the helm at the ATFD and served as chairwoman until June 2021, before handing the reins over to a new executive board.

Following the ouster of Ben Ali, she became actively involved in various ways in the democratic transition process and placed her expertise at the service of the High Authority for the Achievement of the Goals of the Revolution. In doing so, she seized yet another opportunity to denounce abuses and inequalities in human rights issues and to advocate for “full equality between men and women.”

For Yosra, gender equality is not only a cause to which she has been dedicated since her earliest youth, but also a holistic concept, a vision, a goal, and a guiding principle: a conditio sine qua non for the well-being of any society.

In 2017, she was involved in the passage—and even the drafting—of Tunisia’s first comprehensive law against all forms of violence against women and girls. A law that was sharply criticized by the Islamists, who were in power at the time and held a majority in Parliament.

She is proud of this achievement and makes no secret of it. It is a law for whose concrete implementation she continues to fight in all parts of the country. It is a law that, among other things, enables Yosra’s younger sister—Wafa Frawes, a longtime ATFD activist and staff member of the aid organization Beity—to take legal action against violations of women’s rights on social media. Wafa is one of the first Tunisian women to file a complaint against one of her harassers—a man who is waging a smear campaign against her on Facebook.

Feminism: Joining Forces

It was also Yosra Frawes who raised awareness that the feminist struggle and the fight for LGBTQ++ rights in Tunisia are intertwined. In November 2019, she faced hostility for demonstrating side by side with LGBTQ++ activists. That hasn’t stopped her from continuing to support the fight for LGBTQ++ rights. In an interview in late December 2019, she explained it this way: “We join forces above all because we are united by our commitment to indivisible human rights, but also because we share the same demands: Eliminate inequalities and end legal discrimination! And finally, because our encounters strengthen us in our struggles, which we view as inextricably linked.”

In addition to the FIDH, she brought in other organizations in 2017 to draft the civil society stakeholders’ report, which was submitted to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council as part of the UN Universal Periodic Review for Tunisia.

Since 2012, she has been campaigning for the release of Jabeur Mejri, who was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for posting allegedly blasphemous cartoons on Facebook. She will not rest until he is able to leave Tunisia and continue his artistic career in safe exile.

In conclusion:

After her term as chair of the ATFD ended, Yosra Frawes rejoined the circle of activists of all ages who are active in the regions and districts, and she shares their joy in encountering more and more emancipated women time and again.

She continues to advocate—privately, professionally, and publicly—for true equality in women’s everyday lives. She is currently leading a project on gender equality in inheritance law in the Maghreb countries of Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. This is a daring struggle in the societies of these three countries, where the transfer of assets has thus far been governed by discriminatory laws that invoke religion, tradition, and Sharia law. For Yosra Frawes, women’s self-determination is first and foremost a matter of equal access to economic resources.