Repression in Algeria continues one month before elections
Thousands of people demonstrated again this week in Algiers, surrounded by an extensive police deployment, to protest against the system of government in power in the country, showing their dissatisfaction with the call for elections on 12 June and to denounce and demand the release of members of the Hirak movement arrested during the demonstrations.
The Hirak group, which led to the fall of former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 2019, has stepped up its activity, following Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune's decision to dissolve parliament and reshuffle the government to call early elections, as they see it as a move to ease pressure on the economic and political crisis. The group is demanding a profound change in Algeria's political system since independence from France.
According to the daily Le Figaro, the authorities claim that the call for elections is in line with the protesters' demands, where they consider that important compromises have been reached: the release of almost all detainees, the change of the electoral code, and explain that "responses have been adapted to the threats".
Protest marches are held every Friday in Algiers and elsewhere. However, the approaching elections have increased government repression and arrests of demonstrators.
On 2 May, hundreds of firefighters were arrested for attempting to march to the Presidency of the Republic to demand an improvement in their working conditions. Many of them have been suspended pending prosecution for breaking the law, as they do not have the right to strike or demonstrate.
Student demonstrations, which take place on Tuesdays in Algiers, have also been cancelled, for the third time, due to police repression. Several arrests and detentions took place, several demonstrators, students of the Hirak protest movement, were arrested, according to the CNLD, the Committee for the Liberation of Detainees, as reported by the daily Liberte. The arrests are mainly linked to activists and journalists, who were assaulted during the demonstrations, and the country's authorities have threatened to definitively withdraw accreditation from media outlets such as FRANCE 24, as the newspaper itself points out.
On Sunday 9 May, Belkacem Zeghmati, Minister of Justice, announced in a communiqué the new measures applicable to demonstrations, in which the organisers of the marches must identify the names of those responsible and the times of their start and end, stressing that failure to comply with these procedures "deprives the march of all its legal character and implies treatment accordingly", according to the daily Moudjahid.
Meanwhile, on the international scene, the United Nations expressed in March its "grave concern" about human rights and arrests among demonstrators in the country causing the "deterioration" of the situation in Algeria.
Two days after the government's new directives, in view of future demonstrations, the UN has spoken out and called on the Algerian government to "stop using violence" against peaceful demonstrators and to put an end to "arbitrary arrests".
