By Lamyaâ Achary, Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Fellow (2025-26)
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
In October 2025, Damj, the Tunisian Association for Justice and Equality, declared a Queer State of Emergency for the second time in eight months. Seventy-one people had been arrested across four governorates, most of them transgender women, and thirty-two had already been sentenced to prison terms of up to three years. The evidence used to prosecute them included women's clothing, condoms, and private conversations on dating applications. They were convicted under Article 230 of the Tunisian Penal Code, which criminalizes sodomy or same sex relations between men or women. The law was written during the French protectorate, and it has not been amended since.
Three months later, Cairo 52 Legal Research Institute published a report documenting the systematic erasure of transgender people in Morocco. Citing the Moroccan Coalition for Gender and Sexual Diversity report, between 2017 and 2020, 838 individuals were prosecuted under Article 489 of the Moroccan Penal Code; the provision of the Moroccan code, similar to Article 230 in Tunisia, which makes same sex relations illegal. This is a provision that dates to 1962, formalized just after Morocco’s independence from France. Due to this and other laws in the Moroccan penal code, there remains no legal pathway for gender recognition in Morocco, no access to gender-affirming healthcare. Per the Cairo 52 report, many transgender women find that forced migration is their only exit from a system that has closed every other door.
These repressive conditions, in both Morocco and Tunisia, did not necessitate the passing of new laws. The groundwork for the restriction and revocation of the rights of transgender people is laid out in the very foundations of their legal structure.
The groundwork for the restriction and revocation of the rights of transgender people is laid out in the very foundations of their legal structure.
Both Article 489 in Morocco and Article 230 in Tunisia are applied selectively, targeting individuals often only when there is significant outcry or publicity surrounding specific individuals. They often exist as a threat to those who do not conform to the status quo. Given their formalization in the early stages of establishing the modern states of Morocco and Tunisia, they remain part of the foundations of the security apparatuses of control in both states. The key design feature of both provisions is that they target acts rather than identities, with wide-ranging avenues for what may be considered ‘evidence.’ The vagueness of the law grants enforcement authorities discretionary power of an unusually wide kind, allowing for the prosecution of whomever they so choose. The result, documented across the MENA region, is that enforcement frequently has nothing to do with sexual conduct in any meaningful sense. In Tunisia, Amnesty International documented arrests in 2024 and 2025 based on gender presentation alone; the way someone walks, talks, or the clothes they wear being considered evidence of ‘public indecency’ or ‘against good morals or public morality.’ In Morocco, the Cairo 52 report further reinforces this fact, documenting trans women arrested for their appearance in public spaces; their identity documents confiscated, their names and faces made public, their access to employment and housing severed by the mismatch between who they are and what the state insists they must be.
This is not a recent development. What a 2025 mixed-methods study across fourteen MENA countries found is that 51% of transgender respondents described their legal situation as one of systematic criminalization through both explicit laws and the de facto application of morality provisions, with a further 28% unaware of which laws applied to them at all, an environment that enables arbitrary arrests and entrapment. Morality and indecency provisions are deployed against them arbitrarily and continuously. Enforcement has always been opportunistic, intensifying during periods of political pressure, calibrated above all to the presence or absence of accountability. What creates accountability is civil society. And civil society, in both countries, is under sustained attack.
In Tunisia, the assault on civic space is now systematic. President Kais Saied suspended parliament in July 2021, ruled by decree, and formally dissolved it in March 2022. What followed, slowly at first and then rapidly, was the dismantlement of the institutional architecture that had made Tunisia, after 2011, a relatively open environment for civil society. In late October 2025, Tunisian authorities suspended three of the country's most established civic organizations within two weeks of one another: the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women and the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, followed on 31 October by the independent media platform Nawaat. The common thread in these and later suspensions was claims by state authorities of administrative and financial irregularities, foreign-funding violations, and, in some cases, money laundering. As these civic organizations dispute the government's claims, Human Rights Watch has described the action taken against them as a drastic closure of civic space. Amnesty International has further documented that Tunisian authorities have raided the offices of at least three NGOs, frozen the bank accounts of election observers, opened Ministry of Finance investigations into at least ten organizations, and, between July and November 2025, secured court-ordered 30-day suspensions against at least fourteen organizations. The broader capacity for political contestation has narrowed in parallel: on 28 November 2025, a Tunis appeals court handed down prison terms of five to forty-five years to forty defendants in the so-called "conspiracy case," and the leaders of Tunisia's principal political opposition are all currently imprisoned.
Targeted organizations often work in similar domains: social and civic rights, economic justice, women's rights, gender justice, and migrants’ rights, to name a few. Trans rights organizations in particular have faced some of the most immediate effects. Activists associated with Damj, for instance, were summoned for interrogation in October and November 2024, questioned specifically about their organizational work. Mira Ben Salah, a trans activist and the coordinator of Damj's office in Sfax, currently faces multiple ongoing charges related to her work with the organization. Damj has stated publicly that it expects to be next in the wave of organizational suspensions.
Morocco is a different political context, but the direction of action is the same. Bill 03.23, approved by the Government Council in August 2024 and published as Law 03-23 in the Official Gazette in September 2025, amended the criminal procedure law to bar civil society organizations from initiating legal action in cases involving the misuse of public property or funds, concentrating that authority in the Attorney General at the Court of Cassation. A coalition of Moroccan organizations raised the alarm in June 2025 as the amendment cleared the House of Representatives, warning that it would neutralize civil society's essential role in fighting impunity. Freedom House's 2024 country report documents the broader pattern; registration is routinely denied to organizations asserting the rights of marginalized communities; surveillance, travel restrictions, and systematic obstruction of leading human rights organizations' ability to operate, rent event spaces, or maintain bank accounts. For LGBTQI+ groups, which already operate without legal registration because legal registration is unavailable to them, this means compounding legal precarity with no institutional infrastructure to absorb the pressure when enforcement intensifies.
In both Morocco and Tunisia, there is a commonality in practice. Media outrage, stoked by members of state governance, is used to create an environment of outrage and moral panic to allow state authorities to further their repression. Using feminist, LGBTQI+, and civic rights organizations as their target, they create an environment where the rights of all others are also at risk.
These outcomes are not incidental but the product of a legal architecture operating at increasing intensity in conditions of declining accountability.
There is no gender-affirming healthcare in either the public or private sector in Morocco. Healthcare providers deny care, citing fear of legal or professional repercussions, or attempt conversion therapy. Trans individuals access hormones through underground networks, often at significant risk. There is no legal pathway for gender recognition; every interaction with the state, at a border crossing, highway checkpoint, bank, or employment office, is a potential site of exposure, harassment, and arrest. For many transgender women, survival sex work is the only option that remains. For those who can leave, despite severe restrictions and difficulties obtaining the necessary visas, migration is a last resort.
These outcomes are not incidental but the product of a legal architecture operating at increasing intensity in conditions of declining accountability. Trans and gender diverse people are left to navigate a system that was designed, structurally, to leave them no recourse. What civil society provided was partial recourse: legal defense, documentation, emergency support, and friction that slowed the system down. As that friction is removed, the system accelerates.
Understanding what is happening in Morocco and Tunisia requires resisting a framework that organizes LGBTQI+ rights advocacy around legislative moments, new laws passed, new provisions enacted, and new parliamentary votes to pressure. That framework is not wrong, but it is incomplete, capturing the visible surface of repression while missing the mechanism beneath it.
The mechanism in both countries is the activation of legal infrastructure in conditions of diminishing accountability. The laws in place became more repressive because the organizations capable of documenting their application, providing legal defense, and resisting arbitrary enforcement are being progressively dismantled. That distinction has direct policy implications; legal reform advocacy, while necessary in the long term, addresses a different problem than the one currently acute.
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