Human rights in Algeria

Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who has been in power since 1999, lifted a state of emergency in early 2011 and human rights have improved over the last few years. However, the country continues to restrict human rights in significant ways. Extensive nationwide protests, partly over these restrictions, have been raging since 2010.

Perhaps the most serious challenges to human rights in Algeria are the substantial restrictions on freedom of association and of assembly. There are also serious controls on freedom of expression and of the press. Other issues include extensive corruption, official impunity, the overuse of pretrial detention, substandard prison conditions, prisoner abuse, the absence of a free judiciary, restrictions on freedom of movement, violence and discrimination against women, limited workers' rights, and the commission by government agents of arbitrary killings.

Algeria has been categorized by Freedom House as “not free” since it began publishing such ratings in 1972, with the exception of 1989, 1990, and 1991, when the country was labeled “partly free.” To the extent that there is democracy in today's Algeria, it is founded in three pieces of legislation:

• The Political Parties Act (1989, amended 1997), which allowed multiple political parties

• The Associations Act (1987, amended 1990), which permitted establishment of associations

• The Information Act (1990), which paved the way for independent news media

Free elections were held in the country beginning in 1988, but a victory by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in the 1991 parliamentary ballot sparked a military coup d'état and the imposition, in February 1992, of a state of emergency under which basic human rights were suspended. Freedom of expression, association, and assembly were severely restricted, and many individuals were arrested without charge and held without trial. A civil war raged from 1991 to 1999, and since its end there have been no proper official investigations into the massive human-rights violations that took place during the conflict.

The government's main opponent in the war was the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), an Islamic terrorist organization and Al Qaeda affiliate that was described by John R. Schindler in The National Interest in July 2012 as “supremely violent” and as the perpetrator of “a wave of bombings in Paris in the summer of 1995 that were “Al Qaeda’s first attacks on the West.” Schindler notes that “Algeria’s nightmare years of 1993–1997 were a focus of the international human-rights community” but that “the terrible fratricide [of] the 1990s got little coverage in Western media, despite the fact that it probably claimed twice as many lives as the Bosnian conflict, which ran concurrently and received nonstop Western attention.” Schindler added that “Algeria’s bloody civil war, which began twenty years ago, never really ended.”

...
Wikipedia