A Tunisian court on Wednesday sentenced 10 environmental activists to up to a year in prison over an anti-pollution protest they attended in 2020, a defence lawyer said.
Eight of them were sentenced to six-month suspended sentences, lawyer Hamida Chaieb said.
The activists had taken part in a demonstration against a major phosphate-processing factory in southern Tunisia's coastal city of Gabes, where locals have complained about pollution and health issues they linked to the plant.
The case stemmed from a complaint by the state-run factory, which accused the activists of obstructing its operations, Chaieb said.
The activists were arrested at the time but later released amid pressure from rights groups.
They believed the case against them had been dropped, said Khayreddine Debaya, head of the campaign group, Stop Pollution, which has led several protests against the facility.
But in March this year, the activists discovered they had been sentenced in 2023 to one year in prison in absentia.
The court retried them in their presence this time, handing only two of them one-year jail terms while Debaya was among those who received six-month suspended sentences.
The plant, inaugurated in 1972, processes phosphate to make fertilisers, and some of the gases and waste it discharges into the open air and the Mediterranean are radioactive and can cause cancer, researchers have found.
In February, a court rejected demands to suspend the facility's operations.
Taking advantage of rising prices for fertiliser on global markets, Tunisia now wants its output to increase more than fourfold by 2030.
President Kais Saied has long vowed to revive Tunisia's phosphate sector, hindered by years of underinvestment and unrest, calling it a "pillar of the national economy".