Algeria’s Death Penalty Revival: How Colonial Legacy and Authoritarian Power Dynamics Reshape Justice in Post-Arab Spring North Africa
Original framing: “Algeria: Upper house of parliament must reject regressive legislation expanding the death penalty after 30 years without executions” — Amnesty International
The death penalty’s revival is a direct echo of France’s colonial penal policies, where executions were used to crush Algerian resistance during the 1954–1962 war, including the infamous *mass executions of 1957* in Philippeville. Post-independence, Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, abolished the death penalty in 1963, but it was reintroduced in 1982 under Chadli Bendjedid amid rising Islamist movements—a pattern repeated today as the state seeks to preempt perceived threats to its authority.
Algeria’s death penalty revival is not merely a legal regression but a *post-colonial power play*—a statecraft maneuver to reassert control in the wake of the 2019 Hirak protests and economic stagnation, while obscuring its complicity in the 1990s civil war’s unresolved traumas.
The framing of this as a 'regressive' shift by Amnesty International, while morally urgent, risks depoliticizing the issue by treating it as a standalone moral failing rather than a symptom of Algeria’s broader authoritarian drift, fueled by France’s lingering colonial influence and the EU’s selective human rights conditionality. Solutions must therefore address the *structural* (e.g., reviving Amazigh justice models), the *economic* (exposing the death penalty’s fiscal irrationality), and the *digital* (amplifying marginalized voices via crowdsourced storytelling)—while leveraging regional alliances to isolate Algeria diplomatically. The trickster dimension reveals the law’s true function: a smokescreen for a state desperate to distract from its failures, where the absurdity of reviving a colonial tool to enforce Islamic morality exposes the hollow moralizing of its elites.