Noureddine Bhiri

Noureddine Bhiri is the deputy minister of political affairs in the interim government of Prime Minister Ali Laarayedh. He previously served as the minister of justice in the interim government of former Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali. On March 8, 2013, the then Prime Minister-Designate Laarayedh announced the long-awaited cabinet reshuffle in which Bhiri was moved from the Ministry of Justice to his current position.

He is an influential leader within the center-right Islamist party Ennahdha, and a member of the party’s executive bureau. He was the head of its list in the electoral list of Ben Arous, and is now a deputy in the Constituent Assembly .

Bhiri was born in Jebinia, Sfax, in 1958. He joined Ennahda in 1977, when the party was still banned by Habib Bourguiba’s government. Islamist political opposition had become the target of a government crackdown, and many Islamists were jailed or forced into exile during this period. Bhiri was imprisoned from February-September 1987, to only two months before Ben Ali’s ascension to power.

Bhiri is a lawyer in Tunis’s court of appeal. He was a member of several NGO’s, defending the independence of the judiciary from the Ben Ali regime. He is now a member of an association supporting the Syrian revolution and another association against the normalization of relations with Israel. In 2006, Bhiri wrote an op-ed piece for Nawaat.org, a renowned Tunisian blog, in which he criticized American and Israeli policy toward the process of democratization in the Palestinian Territories.