General Introduction 1. The present Report gives an account of the principal legislative and practical measures adopted by Tunisia during the period 1995-2006 to strengthen the implementation of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The Tunisian Government is pleased with this opportunity which enables it to outline its global and integrated Human Rights approach. 2. Using as basis the national reformist cultural heritage to enrich the rights of the individual and the definition of his rights and making reference to the international human rights instruments, President Zine El Abibidine Ben Ali has consistently initiated a vision of Human Rights which takes into account the dialectic link existing between the protection and promotion of these rights in their entirety, complementarity and interdependence. 3. This global approach to Human Rights stems from the conviction that there can be no effective democracy without human development, nor can there be development without democracy, the one being a corollary of the other. This notion of the globality, indivisibility and complementarity of human rights is inscribed in the Constitution of the Tunisian Republic as had been modified by the Constitutional Law n° 2002-51 of 1st June 2002, bringing substantial reform to the fundamental law of the State. 4. This dialectic, without excluding the functional specificities existing between the various human rights categories involves, in the context of the period covered by the present Report (1995-2006), the preparation and the putting into practice of social democracy by means of national programmes in the sectors of education, training, health, shelter, employment, the family and of political democracy through the consolidation of the right to participation, of the strengthening of civil society and the Rule of Law. This approach generates an impetus and a dynamism for the promotion of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. 5. The dispassionate and progressive approach adopted by Tunisia in the area of protection and promotion of human rights takes its impetus from the political conviction that fundamental reforms constitute a process whose aim is to vitalize the bases of a progressive political life offering the maximum of possibilities for participation to the different actors of an organized political life and of a society which is just, well-stable and interdependent. 6. The development of the democratic process has required the progressive entrenchment of political pluralism in the mentalities and behaviour and in the institutions and components of civil society. This dynamism stems from the choice of a national and sovereign policy aimed at enabling the Tunisians to benefit daily from the advantages of a local, responsible and transparent democracy, and to collectively lay the foundations of a system of good governance based both on equality, on the ethics of responsibility, and on the independence and primacy of the law. 7. The Rule of Law, a fundamental concept in the construction of modernity, is crystallized in the Tunisian context by the equality of all before the law and 5