Essebsi william

Essebsi had been hospitalized late last month and spent a week in hospital after suffering what authorities described as a severe health crisis.
However, Essebsi's improbable life and accomplishments spanned over nine decades, making him, at 92, the world's third-oldest head of state.
TUNIS (Reuters) - Tunisia's 92-year-old president, Beji Caid Essebsi, has died, the presidency said in a statement on Thursday.

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Can Tunisia find a compromise on equal inheritance?

Sixty years later, President Essebsi ventures where Bourguiba would not dare: the codification of equal inheritance. On August 13, 2017—National Women’s Day—Essebsi formed the Commission on Individual Liberties and Equality (COLIBE) to study what reforms needed to be made to bring laws in accordance with the 2014 constitution and international conventions. In June, the commission released its 235-page report, advocating for, among other issues, equal inheritance, decriminalization of homosexuality, and abolition of the death penalty. This National Women’s Day (2018), President Essebsi announced his agreement with the COLIBE report’s recommendation for equal inheritance, pledging to introduce a bill to the parliament in the coming months.

While most media coverage reported that Essebsi seeks to guarantee equal inheritance, what he and the COLIBE report in fact propose is a compromise. Essebsi has offered to allow individuals to continue to follow Islamic guidelines if they wish, but in the absence of such a will, to default to

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Tunisia’s patrician president embodied its strengths, values, and vulnerabilities

Laudatory statements and obituaries are pouring in for Béji Caïd Essebsi, who died last Thursday, July 25, in Tunis, and have emphasized his singular landmark accomplishment: serving as Tunisia’s first democratically elected president. A majestic Saturday funeral brought the Arab world’s only true democracy to a standstill as it entered a national week of mourning for its patriarch. However, Essebsi’s improbable life and accomplishments spanned over nine decades, making him, at 92, the world’s third-oldest head of state after Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and Queen Elizabeth II, neither of whom helped found a nation emerging from colonialism or guided one through dramatic moments of democratization. Essebsi modeled his historic presidency on that of his idol and comrade-in-arms, Habib Bourguiba, with whom he struggled in the 1940s and 1950s to liberate the country from French rule and then labored decades more to build a modern state and educate a progressive polity. It was beneath large