Tunisia’s Parliament yesterday overwhelmingly approved legislation allowing the death penalty for those convicted on terrorism charges after Islamist militant attacks that killed dozens of foreign visitors in the past few months.

Last month, a gunman killed 38 mostly British tourists in the Tunisian seaside city of Sousse. In March, two gunmen killed 21 foreign tourists and a policeman at Tunis’s Bardo Museum. Both attacks were claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group.

It would open the way to prosecuting political dissent as terrorism

MPs approved the Bill by a margin of 174-0 with 10 abstentions early Friday after three days of debate in what Parliament speaker Mohamed Ennaceur called an “extraordinary effort” to make the North African country a safer place.

Human Rights Watch had criticised the Bill, which also eases arrests of suspects, saying it “would open the way to prosecuting political dissent as terrorism, give judges overly broad powers, and curtail lawyers’ ability to provide an effective defence”.

The Bill, debated in Parliament for years but put forward after the Sousse attack, will replace a law from 2003 which then president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, toppled in a popular uprising in 2011, had used to crush dissent.