Anti-Covid-19 Measures in North Africa as a Mirror of the Level of Democratic Consolidation

North African nations, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, have been heavily hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in North Africa took proactive legal measures to manage the virus threat, safeguarding population health, but also triggering, in some cases, repressive and invasive mechanisms that jeopardized basic freedoms and rights. This chapter will analyze comparatively anti-COVID-19 legislations, pointing out how the legislative measures mirrored the level of transition of democracy, the opacity of some regimes, exploiting the pandemic to foster repressive control, and highlighting the weakness of new democratic institutions, which were unprepared to balance health security needs and democracy. Anti-pandemic measures showed that, surprisingly, not all governments acted uniformly. The degree of intervention in the private sphere of the citizen by the governments and the limitation of rights greatly varied from state to state. And even though measures apparently looked the same, the constitutional control was different. Some states implemented invasive measures without having a working or effective constitutional court, leaving to the executive power the exclusive monopoly on such sensitive issue. Moreover, COVID-19 had the ability to make clear that some results of the so called ‘Arab Spring’ were a false decoy and a pure Western illusion: Tunisia, considered the ‘sweet fruit’ of the 2011 revolts, revealed its true face of an unconsolidated democracy, enacting a legislation that was a legacy of the Bourguiba regime and deeply disrespectful of the citizens’ basic rights.