ED Sociétés, Politique, Santé Publique
Law's Intimacies: Sexual and Gender Diversity between Legal Norms and Judicial Practice in Morocco and Tunisia
by Tachfine BAIDA (Les Afriques dans le Monde)
The defense will take place at 14h00 - Salle Merle LAM, Sciences Po Bordeaux, Pessac, France
in front of the jury composed of
- Baudouin DUPRET - Directeur de recherche - Université de Bordeaux - Directeur de these
- Vanja HAMZIC - Professeur des universités - SOAS, University of London - Rapporteur
- Barbara TRUFFIN - Professeure des universités - Université Libre de Bruxelles - Rapporteur
- Nathalie BERNARD-MAUGIRON - Directrice de recherche - Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) - Examinateur
- Yasmine BERRIANE - Chargée de recherche - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - Examinateur
- Jean-Noël FERRIE - Directeur de recherche - Sciences Po Bordeaux - Examinateur
This thesis presents a comparative socio-legal analysis of the judicial treatment of sexual and gender diversity in Morocco and Tunisia. Drawing primarily on legal materials on same-sex conduct in Morocco and Tunisia in the period between 2001 and 2024, it looks at how national state laws governing sexual orientation and gender diversity are framed, mobilised, interpreted and applied in each country. Rather than treating law as a self-contained system, the analysis foregrounds the interaction between the practical implementation of national criminal law, Islamic normativity, and international human rights law, showing how these normative orders intersect within legal discourse, judicial reasoning and law in action. In this thesis, I argue that the judicial treatment of sexual and gender diversity operates through ongoing processes of interpretation, accommodation, and selective invocation of norms by legal actors, rather than through the straightforward application of statutory law. Judicial practices thus function as key sites where competing normative claims on sexual and gender diversity are negotiated and re-articulated. Ultimately, the analysis demonstrates that the Moroccan and Tunisian justice operate under a persistent tension between, on the one hand, pressures to align with international human rights standards and, on the other, expectations to uphold domestically embedded social and religious moral injunctions.