YUSRA

Yusra Djemali was in Genève toen haar vader, Mustapha, in mei 2024 in Tunis werd gearresteerd. Na een loopbaan bij de Hoge Commissaris van de Verenigde Naties voor de Vluchtelingen richtte hij na zijn pensioen de Tunesische Vluchtelingenraad op, een NGO die vluchtelingen bescherming en ondersteuning biedt. Yusra keerde onmiddellijk terug naar Tunesië om haar vader te steunen. Ondanks dat hij al ruim 80 jaar oud was, werd Mustapha 19 maanden lang zonder veroordeling vastgehouden. Elke week stond de familie in een hitte van bijna 50 °C in de rij voor een bezoek van slechts tien minuten. Protect Humanitarians stond de familie bij tot Mustapha op 24 november 2025 werd vrijgelaten. Maar de gevolgen duren voort: de bankrekeningen blijven geblokkeerd en ons team blijft de familie psychologische ondersteuning bieden.

For a long time, Yusra and her brother were alone, struggling to find a solution with no support. But over time, organisations came forward with legal and financial support and the family met others who had lived the same nightmare and come through it. Learning they were not alone, Yusra says, is what let them keep going.

There was no conviction in all of it. Mustapha was held for 19 months in pre-trial detention with, as the family describes it, an empty file, accused in practice of nothing. They made seven requests for his release. All seven were refused.

The eighth time, they were not expecting anything. The hearing on 24 November 2025 had already been postponed more than once, and they had prepared themselves for release so many times before that this time they had done nothing at all. Yusra was sitting on the sofa when the lawyer called around eight in the evening and asked if she had food ready for her father, because he was getting out in two hours.

He was released late that night, close to one in the morning, alongside his co-accused Abderrazek Krimi. The families went together to a café to sit and talk. It felt, Yusra says, unreal.

Unfortunately, release was not the end. Her father came out with serious health problems, his lungs, kidney stones from having no clean water to drink, and a sense of being lost that she compares to a child re-learning how to live.

He has since gone back to tending his land and the family house in the south, which is his pleasure, and the family try not to disturb him in it. But the case is not closed. There is an appeal. The accounts are still frozen. And for Yusra and her family there is a long rebuilding still underway, though they are clear that the worst has passed and each day is better than the one before.

What Yusra wants understood is that the people on these posters chose this work freely, out of love and solidarity, and are now being punished for something they decided to give from the heart. If a profession built on helping starts to frighten people away, there will be fewer of them, and the problems will only pile up. Humanitarian aid, she says, is essential, because otherwise the world will crack.

What the experience left her with, in the end, was a kind of rage to help, to reach the families going through what hers went through, and to tell them the thing she most needed to hear: you are not alone, we are all here.

How Protect Humanitarians supports Yusra and her family

Protect Humanitarians supported Yusra's family through her father's detention and stands with them today as part of our survivor network, alongside humanitarians and families affected by attacks, detention and persecution worldwide.

Photos: © Victoria Vidal/Protect Humanitarians