At least 261 femicides have been committed in Algeria since 2019, with half of the victims being mothers and 16 pregnant when they were killed, a report presented yesterday near Algiers reveals.

From January 1, 2023, “33 women were murdered”, while “from 2019 to 2022, another 228 were murdered”, emphasized Viame Aures, a member of the collective “Femicides in Algeria”, presenting this report, which is not exhaustive and is mainly based in open sources – press publications – about these cases.

From 2019 to 2022, a group of women collected data on the phenomenon in Algeria; according to the resulting report, “at least one woman” is murdered every week in the country.

In the majority of cases, the victims were stabbed, strangled or shot, the text emphasizes, in which there are cases of women who were burned alive.

“The common element is that they were targeted because they were women,” in a country where patriarchy reigns and society remains extremely conservative, said Aures, whose collective has been in direct contact with some of the victims’ families.

The reasons mainly given by the perpetrators were “jealousy” and “alleged honor crimes”, while others had mental health problems.

“Almost 80% of femicides are committed by a member of the victim’s family”, Mrs. Aures pointed out, underlining that in 61% of the cases it was the victim’s partner, in some cases “policemen or soldiers who murdered their wives in official clothes the weapons”.

The report also refers to youths who murdered their mothers.

In some cases, entire families cooperated in killings, as in the case of “Nihal, 19, who was killed in March 2022 by relatives who spoke of an honor crime because she was pregnant out of wedlock,” the report notes.

The majority of murders (71%) were committed indoors (home, workplace…).

The collective highlighted loopholes in Algeria’s legislation and judicial system, judging that women are not sufficiently protected from violence of this nature and that some perpetrators of femicide are given excessively lenient sentences.

In four years, there were 13 convictions for femicide in Algeria. In all cases where the death penalty was imposed, it was commuted to life imprisonment: there has been a moratorium on the imposition of the death penalty in the country since 1993.