Algeria

Following the discovery of another mass grave last Thursday, Amnesty International has called upon the Algerian authorities to fully investigate the site and to treat previously unearthed graves similarly. According to Algerian security sources, the grave contains more than a dozen bodies of victims of killings committed by an armed group during the mid-1990s. In recent months, Amnesty International has repeatedly expressed concern about the failure of the Algerian authorities to investigate ...read more

The Algerian government has jailed several journalists critical of its president and slapped a "temporary freeze" on the Arabic satellite channel al-Jazeera. It is the most severe attack on the freedom of the press since President M. Abdelaziz Bouteflika came to power in April 1999. The North African country has one of the freest print medias in the Arab world.

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) has strongly condemned the Algerian authorities' decision to "temporarily freeze" the Arabic satellite channel al-Jazeera's activities in Algeria and called for an immediate lifting of the ban. "This unfair decision amounts to nothing more than censorship," said RSF. "This is the first time for more than ten years that a foreign television channel in Algeria has been banned from covering news in this way."

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika vowed Monday to free women from the yoke of the repressive Islamic "family code" that considers them perpetually dependent on men. Bouteflika, taking the oath of office for his second and final term after winning re-election in a landslide on April 8, said he rejected that women "should be subjected to a status that assails their rights and condemns them to a condition inferior to men".

The plight of what could be more than a million people uprooted by violence in Algeria's conflict between the government and groups of armed Islamist extremists is largely ignored by the international community, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Refugee Council's Global IDP Project. “Our analysis suggests that the scope of the displacement crisis in Algeria is much more significant than previously thought,” said Raymond Johansen, the organisation's Secretary General.

Pages