Nationalist ruling parties, national governments ideologies partisans and statesmen: human rights offenders and human rights defenders in the North African post-colonial states and societies

This paper will examine the interaction between nationalism and constitutionalism as ideology and movement, as well as the institutional arrangement that make them instrumental politically at the hands of different socio-economic actors. Secondly, I will try to explain why among the emerging national elites, in the Maghreb, the populist nationalists prevailed on the liberal modernisers and radical intelligentsia and how they left a despotic impact on the modern embryonic relation between state and society. In the third section, the case of Tunisia is used as an illustration of how the monopolisation of nationalist ideology by particular groups prepared the terrain for concentration of power within mono-partisan and state structures. The decolonised people, instead of enjoying the promised ‘national liberation’ and ‘public liberties’, discovered that the human rights they fought for were denied by the new political system. This section is followed by an overview of the post-independence state oppression marked by statist nationalist ideology as exemplified by the particular situation that characterised the political life in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. The fifth section of this paper focuses on the five members of the Union of the Arab Maghreb (UMA: Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia) as parties to international human rights instruments, and committed, in principle, to enforcing them. The last theme to be addressed revolves around the human rights' record in North Africa between 2000 and 2008.