During the presidency of Habib Bourguiba, he was successively attached cabinet to the Ministry of the Interior and Equipment (1972), chief of staff of Defense Ministers Abdallah Farhat and Rachid Sfar.
On 11 April 1988, he became Minister of Defense before replacing General Abdelhamid Escheikh at the head of the Ministry of the Interior from 17 February 1991 to 24 January 1995, in a context of struggle against Islamism.
Treasurer of the Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD) from 1988, he was a member of his political bureau and its central committee until his removal from the party on January 18, 2011.
[4] While Hatem Ben Salem was seen by an employee of the hospital, he called Abdennacer Nait-Liman, a Tunisian political refugee living in Geneva since 1995 and president of an association of victims of torture in Tunisia.
[4] He informed Éric Sottas, director of the World Organization against Torture in Geneva, and lawyer François Françoisz, and lodged a complaint against Kallel for "grievous bodily harm, kidnapping, insults, endangering the health, constraints and abuse of authority"; Naït-Liman was indeed tortured in the premises of the Ministry of the Interior between April 22 and June 1, 1992.
[6] This initiative was a first for the Swiss prosecutor's office but Kallel leaves the territory in time thanks to the diplomatic passport that confers on him his rank of minister.