Tunisia's most wanted man drove up to the courthouse in Tunis with his wife and two teenage daughters on February 2nd, hooting the car horn to make sure no one missed him emerging from hiding.
For four years Hamma Hammami's photograph hung in every commissariat of the north African police state. The 50 year-old professor of Arabic literature and civilisation has never advocated violence, but he wasrepeatedly tortured. "In Tunisia, they torture first and ask questions later," he says.
His latest sentence, to nine years and three months in prison, was confirmed this month. Mr Hammami's crimes? Membership in the Communist Party and campaigning for democracy, freedom of the press and the end of torture.
Mr Hammami has spent most of the past three decades in prison or underground, first under Habib Bourguiba, and since 1987 under the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, a former policeman who has ensured that his country has the highest per capita ratio of cops in the world. In Tunisia, you must submit the guest list for a wedding reception to the police first. Police block telephone calls to human rights activists in Europe, and the family of anyone suspected of political activity is harassed and kept under close surveillance.
Most of Mr Hammami's friends had not seen him since he last went underground four years ago. "Everyone embraced him. It was like a celebration," said Marguerite Rollinde, a French university researcher and the secretary general of the human rights group Hourriya/Liberté.
At the end of January Mr Hammami announced on the London-based Tunisian opposition television station that he and three other leftists, Abdeljabar Madouri, Samir Taamallah and Ammar Amroussia - all sentenced in absentia - would come out of hiding as soon as their retrial was scheduled. Western human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Frontline, the new Dublin-based organisation for human rights defenders, are the bane of President Ben Ali's existence. To prevent them sending observers to the trial, the Tunisian government scheduled it immediately.
Ms Rollinde was one of 32 international observers who nonetheless travelled to Tunis on short notice. "Hamma stood on the steps of the courthouse and said, 'I'm turning myself in of my own free will. Now judge me'." What ensued, Ms Rollinde believes, was a turning point for the Ben Ali regime. Anarchy broke out in the courthouse, with hundreds of opposition supporters moving through the building, standing on tables, singing the Internationale and chanting "freedom".
Police locked the wrought iron gates to prevent anyone leaving. "They lost control," Ms Rollinde continues. "The police decided there was no role for justice in this affair." Mr Ben Ali's secret police invaded the courtroom, pushed everyone aside and kidnapped the men who'd turned themselves in.
Mr Hammami's 13-year-old daughter tried to hold on to her father. She bled from the mouth after being knocked down.
"Independent justice!" Mr Madouri cried out at one point during the chaotic afternoon. At 6 p.m., a judge appeared to utter one sentence: "The verdict remains as it was." Mr Madouri was given an extra two years for his outburst.
Dr Moncef Marzouki, the human rights activist and opposition politician who was freed from house arrest in honour of President Jacques Chirac's recent visit to Tunis, says February 2nd marked "another step in the disintegration of the theatre of Tunisian justice". Dr Marzouki spent four months in prison for standing against Mr Ben Ali in the last presidential election. The government refused to legalise his human rights group, so he started a political party, for which he received a one-year suspended sentence. His telephone was cut and three plainclothes policemen followed him everywhere. The professor, dismissed from the Sousse medical faculty, now teaches in Paris.
Dr Marzouki has just returned from a speaking tour at Georgetown, MIT and Harvard. "American civil society is very interested to hear Arab democrats," he said. "But US officials gave me a cold reception. They totally support Ben Ali. The Bush administration thinks Ben Ali is fighting 'terrorism', but dictatorships like his create terrorism."
Back in Tunisia Mr Hammami has been in solitary confinement for three weeks. His wife, the human rights lawyer Radhia Nasrawi, has not been allowed to see him. She thinks his appeal will be scheduled quickly, to avoid giving human rights groups time to organise. On Sunday she and 15 other Tunisians attempted to hold a "solidarity meeting" in the small town of Jendouba.
Police turned them around on the highway, then followed them back to Tunis. When they stopped for coffee, police shut the cafe down. "We went to a restaurant and ordered dinner," she said. "The food was on the table. We had started eating and the waiters took the plates away. Their hands were trembling."