Rachid Sabbagh

Rachid Sabbagh was a Tunisian magistrate and independent politician whose career linked the courts, Islamic legal scholarship and the post-revolution cabinets that steered the country through one of its most unsettled decades. He is best remembered nationally as defence minister in Ali Larayedh's government in 2013 and 2014, and as a long-serving figure of the administrative and cassation benches who later briefly chaired Tunisia's Higher Islamic Council.

Trained in part at Ez-Zitouna University, Sabbagh entered the judiciary young. Biographical notices say he became a judge at twenty-three and kept a sustained interest in Islamic jurisprudence alongside modern Maghrebi family law. In 1969 he published a study in the Revue tunisienne de droit on the evolution of child custody (hadana) rules across the Maghreb. Under Habib Bourguiba he held senior staff and bench posts, including chef de cabinet to justice ministers Mohamed Bellalouna and Slaheddine Baly, and later served as first president of the Court of Cassation. He was also remembered by the Administrative Court as a former first president.

After the 2011 revolution he returned to public office beyond the courtroom. In July 2011, in Beji Caid Essebsi's transitional government, he was named president of the Higher Islamic Council, a consultative body asked to advise on religious and constitutional questions during the transition from Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's rule. In March 2013 Larayedh appointed him minister of national defence, succeeding Abdelkrim Zbidi. He held the portfolio until January 2014, when Ghazi Jeribi took over.

His months at the Defence Ministry coincided with a sharp security crisis, including operations against armed groups in the western mountains around Mount Chaambi. Sabbagh publicly defended a republican conception of the national army and the independence of military justice, and presented himself as a magistrate rather than a party politician. In May 2013 he met Larayedh and army chief of staff General Rachid Ammar on the security situation, and he argued that the emergency required maintaining the state of emergency. That same month he visited the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, for talks with U.S. defence leaders including Chuck Hagel and Ash Carter, a trip recorded in official U.S. Department of Defense photographs now in the public domain.

Sabbagh died on 15 September 2026. Tunisia's Administrative Court announced the death of its former first president, and judicial and political circles paid tribute to a career that had spanned Bourguiba-era institutions, the 2011 transition and the Larayedh cabinet. Funeral prayers were held the next day, with burial at Jellaz Cemetery in Tunis.