TUNIS, Tunisia — Basma Balaai was 17 when she first got involved in charity work through a mosque in her native village of Menzel Bouzelfa, near the Mediterranean coast. “I believed I was doing good, serving free meals to the poor,” she said. But Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali disagreed. Like countless others, Balaai was imprisoned and tortured along with immediate family members for “terrorist” activities. “I was flogged, kicked and sexually abused for days on end," Balaai, now 54, told Al-Monitor. "I cannot have children because of what they did to me. They were unspeakable things.” Balaai now joined fellow citizens in a march along Tunis’ main Habib Bourguiba Avenue on Jan. 14 to mark the eighth anniversary of the Jasmine Revolution.

Tunisia is the sole democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring protests that ripped through the region over the past decade. Protests began after Mohamed Bouazizi, an impoverished young Tunisian fruit vendor sick of corruption and police harassment, set himself on fire. Eight years on, many of the same problems that drove Ben Ali’s fall — such as rampant graft and youth unemployment — persist, casting a dark shadow over Tunisia’s infant democracy. Last month a struggling journalist in Kasserine, a perennially neglected backwater bordering Algeria, burned himself to death to protest the lack of change. Anti-government protests are erupting with greater frequency. Allegations of police impunity continue to fuel resentment. "ACAP," the acronym for "All Cops Are Bastards," inspired by the eponymous Italian movie, is scrawled across many walls in the country.

Yet Balaai, who spent long nights paralyzed by the screams of her younger sister as she was tortured in a neighboring cell, does see the light. “My family was destroyed," she said, "but I have faith in hai’at al-haqiqa wa al-karama.” She was referring to Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, the body that was set up in December 2013 to document the mountain of human rights abuses and corruption cases that occurred from 1955 to 2013. A staggering 50,000 cases, each more gruesome than the next, have been filed with the commission, commonly referred to by its French acronym, IVD.

While fellow Arab Spring states have succumbed to war and repression, the IVD remains a potent symbol of Tunisia’s fight to cement a culture of accountability and rule of law. On Dec. 31, the body’s steely president, Sihem Bensedrine, submitted a report of the IVD’s findings to the country’s president, Beji Caid Essebsi, along with a set of recommendations on how to proceed. The dossier is the fruit of five years of painstaking excavation, which saw victims, among them Balaai, describe, on live national television, the horrors they endured.