Policy

The Republic of Tunisia signed the Mine Ban Treaty on 4 December 1997 and ratified on 9 July 1999, becoming a State Party on 1 January 2000.

Tunisia has listed 10 laws that it considers implementation measures for the Mine Ban Treaty.[1]

Tunisia submitted its annual Article 7 transparency report in 2019, covering the period from April 2018 to April 2019.[2]

Tunisia has participated in most past meetings of the convention, but did not attend the Meetings of States Parties in 2016 and 2017. It did attend the Seventeenth Meeting of States Parties in Geneva in November 2018.

In December 2018, Tunisia voted in favor of the annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution promoting implementation of the convention.[3]

Production, transfer, stockpile destruction, and retention

Tunisia has never produced or exported antipersonnel mines, but has imported them in the past.[4] Tunisia completed the destruction of 18,259 stockpiled antipersonnel mines in September 2003.[5]

In its initial declaration in July 2000, Tunisia reported retaining 5,000 antipersonnel mines (4,000 PMA-3 and 1,000 PROM-1) for purposes permitted under Article 3 of the Mine Ban Treaty.[6] In its Article 7 report submitted in 2019, Tunisia reported that it retains 4,405 mines for training and that 55 mines were used for training purposes during the April 2018 to April 2019 reporting period.[7] Tunisia has not specified the type of retained mines that it has destroyed, nor has it reported in detail on the intended purposes and actual uses of retained mines, as agreed by States Parties in 2004.

Use

Since April 2013, the new use of improvised mines and other types of improvised explosive devices (IED) by non-state armed groups has been reported during the Tunisian armed forces’ ongoing operations against Islamist armed groups in the of Qsrein Wilaya/Kasserine and Gafsa governorates near the Algerian border.[8]

New casualties caused by victim-activated improvised mines were reported in 2018 in the Jebal Al-Cha’anby area.[9] In 2019, multiple incidents were reported in Gafsa governorate in southwest Tunisia.[10] The Monitor cannot confirm when the improvised mines were laid.[11] (See the Casualty and Victim Assistance profile for more details.) Previously, in May 2013, the Ministry of Defense stated that the mines laid at Jebel Al-Cha’anby were homemade mines constructed from a plastic container with a chemical initiator, making detection difficult.[12] A spokesperson said, “the mines that exploded were made of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and flammable materials that can easily explode when exposed to heat.”[13]

In May 2013, a police official told Human Rights Watch (HRW) that the late April casualties were caused by “artisanal” (or homemade) antipersonnel mines that exploded horizontally, and from this description, the mines would appear to be homemade tripwire-initiated explosive devices similar to Claymore mines.[14] Tunisia has not reported on the contamination by improvised landmines in its annual Article 7 transparency report.