His Holiness Leo XIV
The Apostolic Palace
Vatican City
Your Holiness,
Ahead of your upcoming historic visit to Algeria, scheduled from 13 to 15 April 2026, the undersigned human rights organizations are writing to bring your attention to key pressing human rights concerns in the country. We call on you to use your good offices to raise these concerns with the Algerian authorities in private as well as in your public communications surrounding the visit and call on them to uphold their obligations under international human rights law.
Violations of the Right to Freedom of Religion and Belief
The undersigned organizations are concerned that religious minorities, including Christians from the Protestant Church of Algeria (EPA) and Ahmadi Muslims, face discriminatory legal and administrative restrictions curtailing their ability to practice, organize, and express their faith openly.
The Algerian authorities have persistently denied the EPA and Ahmadi Muslims official registration under Ordinance 06-03 regulating religious faiths other than Islam and under Law 12-06 on Associations. Authorities have subjected them and others to arbitrary detention and unjust prosecution solely for exercising their right to freedom of belief. Courts have sentenced Christians and Ahmadi Muslims to prison for "unauthorized worship", "unauthorized donation," or "offense to Islam". Based on Amnesty International's documentation, at least one Ahmadi Muslim, Marwan Melouk from Tipaza, near Algiers, has been in arbitrary pretrial detention since November 2025. Since 2017, more than 40 Protestant churches were forced to shut down either due to administrative orders by the authorities or judicial harassment of their members.
These violations are taking place against the backdrop of the adoption of a new Constitution in 2020, which removed a provision protecting the right to freedom of conscience.
We ask that you call on the authorities to end discrimination against religious minorities and respect their right to freedom of religion or belief, including practicing their religion freely.
Crackdown on Civic Space
Since the emergence of the Hirak protest movement in 2019, Algerian authorities have waged a sustained crackdown on civic space. Hundreds of protesters, activists, journalists, and human rights defenders have been arbitrarily detained, unjustly prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms for exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. Most recently, on 1 February 2026, an appeals court sentenced human rights defender and unionist Ali Mammeri to ten years in prison, after convicting him of baseless terrorism-related charges solely due to his peaceful union activism. At least five prominent human rights and civil society organizations have been dissolved, shut down, or pressured to suspend their activities, including Caritas. Only weeks ago, local authorities sealed the office of SOS Disparus, a human rights organization advocating for accountability for the thousands forcibly disappeared in the 1990s armed conflict.
Travel bans have become an additional tool of repression: often imposed without prior notification, written justification, or any avenue for appeal. Among those targeted are activists from religious and ethnic minorities. On 6 March 2026, Algerian authorities arbitrarily prevented Christian and Amazigh activist Slimane Bouhafs from leaving the country for the second time.
Former president of the St. Augustin Coordination of Christians in Algeria, Slimane Bouhafs, fled Algeria to Tunisia in 2018 and was recognized as a refugee by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). In August 2021, individuals violently abducted him from his home in Tunis and forcibly returned him to Algeria, where he was arbitrarily detained and said he was subjected to torture and other ill-treatment. Authorities convicted him of "undermining the integrity of the national territory" and sentenced him to three years in prison.
We urge you to call on the Algerian authorities to lift arbitrary travel bans, respect the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, and release those arbitrarily detained for exercising their human rights.
Violations Against Refugees and Migrants
The undersigned organizations have documented how authorities subject refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants, notably from sub-Saharan Africa to serious human rights violations in Algeria. Algerian authorities often harass and target people for arrest based on racial profiling. People arrested for immigration reasons have been subjected to abuses and other inhumane or degrading treatment in detention.
Algerian authorities have also continuously carried out collective and summary expulsions of refugees and migrants of many African nationalities to Niger, often without due process (without individual case assessments or opportunities to contest the expulsion) and in violation of the principle of non-refoulement due to the risks to their lives in the desert. Security forces abandon those expelled including pregnant women and children in remote desert areas on the Algerian-Niger border, exposing them to life-threatening conditions as they are forced to walk long distances often without adequate water or food to reach Assamaka in Niger. The scale of these unlawful and dangerous expulsions reached record levels in the past few years: at least 31,000 and 34,000 were expelled in 2024 and 2025, respectively, according to NGO Alarm Phone Sahara. In 2025, Alarm Phone reported seven deaths of migrants following these expulsions, but many deaths go unrecorded.
We urge the Pope to raise the plight of refugees and migrants in Algeria and urge the authorities to end violations of their rights including racial profiling and discrimination, arbitrary detention, and collective expulsions. The government should uphold the rights of everyone, including foreign nationals, to dignity and security and to be protected from torture and other ill-treatment.
Signatories:
- EuroMed Rights
- Human Rights Watch
- MENA Rights Group
