International Law and Women’s Rights in Algeria: How CEDAW and the Maputo Protocol Have Shaped Family Law

Writer: Adriana Gutu

Article Editor: Taylor Schultz

Associate Editor: Dina Fakhar & Leona Rindle

Women in Algeria consistently fought for their rights, first during the Algerian War of Independence and later during the Algerian Civil War. Fighting relentlessly with and without the veil, Algerian women put their lives at risk for their country, yet they had fewer rights than before. Following the Algerian War of Independence, the reconstruction period was marked by a complex mix of social, political, and economic factors that continued to affect women. Women in Africa were excluded from mainstream political parties and instead were forced into women-only parties, resulting in little to no influence in the legislature. According to historian Adrienne Leonhardt, women did not achieve equal rights when Algeria gained its independence in 1962.¹

The Algerian family code, rooted in the state’s interpretation of Shariʿa (Islamic law), institutionalized a patriarchal family structure that limited women’s autonomy and political participation. It granted men authority over central aspects of family life, including marriage, divorce, and child custody, reinforcing male dominance and restricting women’s legal and social agency. This legal framework directly conflicted with Algeria’s constitutional commitment to gender equality, yet the importance of family law in social governance allowed patriarchal norms to override constitutional principles in practice. Through selective legal interpretation, Algerian political institutions upheld legislation that systematically disadvantaged women despite formal equality guarantees.²

Most African countries established policies to support women’s development, commonly known as national machineries, following a 1975 UN resolution calling for such mechanisms.³ National machineries were established in Algeria in 1962, prior to the resolution’s passage, yet they did not fully promote women’s success in government, representation, and influence. Algeria’s commitments under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Maputo Protocol, as reflected in the UN Treaty Collection, produced limited domestic change due to reservations and constrained implementation. Women’s labor-face participation remained markedly more than men’s. According to a 2022 World Bank study, women accounted for only 16.6 percent of the Algerian workforce in 2019, compared to 66.73 percent for men, and women consistently accounted for far lower percentages of workforce participation from 2010 to 2021.⁴ 

Adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is an international treaty that serves as a comprehensive bill of rights for women. CEDAW established a broad international legal framework for achieving women’s equality by defining discrimination expansively and imposing affirmative obligations on states to eliminate it in law and practice.⁵ Its core provisions required not only the prohibition of direct and indirect discrimination but also the pursuit of substantive equality through active measures, including temporary special measures such as affirmative action. CEDAW recognized that women’s inequality was sustained by structural, cultural, and social factors, obligating states to challenge gender stereotypes, reform discriminatory family and personal status laws, and ensure equal participation in political and public life.⁶ It further guaranteed equality in education, employment, health care, and marriage and family relations, explicitly rejecting the public–private divide that historically shielded gender discrimination from legal scrutiny.

CEDAW was directly connected to the struggles of Algerian women during both the War of Independence (1954–1962) and the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s by highlighting the gap between women’s political participation in conflict and their post-conflict exclusion from rights and power. During the War of Independence, women participated as combatants, couriers, intelligence operatives, and organizers, temporarily disrupting traditional gender hierarchies; however, after independence, this contribution did not translate into substantive equality, as women were re-marginalized through legal frameworks such as family law and social norms confining them to the private sphere. Similarly, during the Algerian Civil War, women again became central political actors—as targets, resistors, supporters, and in some cases participants in armed groups—often responding to exclusion, repression, and gendered violence. CEDAW’s emphasis on substantive equality, state responsibility, and the dismantling of gender stereotypes provided a framework for understanding why symbolic participation alone was insufficient without structural reform.

The UN Treaty Collection functioned as the authoritative legal record, distinguishing between rhetorical endorsement of women’s equality and binding international commitments.⁷ It documented Algeria’s ratification of CEDAW with substantial reservations, particularly to provisions governing equality before the law and marriage and family relations—domains central to women’s autonomy and political agency.⁸ These reservations limited the treaty’s transformative impact and reflected the state’s prioritization of domestic legal traditions over full compliance. Even where partial withdrawals occurred, Algeria’s engagement with CEDAW remained selective rather than comprehensive.

Similarly, the Maputo Protocol established a regionally binding and substantively stronger framework for women’s equality than many global instruments by directly regulating the areas where gender discrimination was most entrenched.⁹ It set explicit standards on equality in marriage, free and full consent to marriage, minimum age requirements, equal rights within marital relationships, and protection from harmful practices such as forced marriage and gender-based violence. Unlike more general equality provisions, the Maputo Protocol was explicit and prescriptive, leaving limited room for cultural or religious deflection. Its legal architecture reflected an understanding that women’s subordination was sustained primarily through family law, social customs, and bodily control, and it therefore treated these domains as central—not peripheral—to women’s human rights.

In the Algerian context, the standards articulated by the Maputo Protocol sharply illuminated the disconnect between women’s political agency during periods of conflict and their post-conflict legal status. Algerian women’s participation in the War of Independence and later during the Algerian Civil War demonstrated autonomy, consent, and political capacity in practice, yet domestic legal frameworks governing marriage, guardianship, and family relations continued to restrict those same capacities in law. The Maputo Protocol’s insistence on equality within marriage and protection from harmful practices exposed this contradiction by providing a regional benchmark against which Algeria’s family law could be evaluated. In this sense, the Protocol did not merely articulate aspirational norms. It also clarified how the structural inequalities Algerian women resisted through political and, at times, violent mobilization remained embedded in post-conflict legal institutions, reinforcing the very conditions of exclusion that fueled women’s participation in the struggle in the first place.

Overall, the experience of Algerian women revealed a persistent pattern in which extraordinary political participation during periods of conflict did not translate into lasting legal or social equality. Algeria’s engagement with international and regional women’s rights instruments—particularly CEDAW and the Maputo Protocol—remained constrained, as evidenced by its reservations and weak implementation, and as documented in the UN Treaty Collection. Together, these dynamics demonstrated that women’s rights in Algeria were symbolically acknowledged but structurally restricted. Without genuine legal reform and political will, even the most robust equality frameworks remained insufficient to secure the rights women fought to obtain.

1. Adrienne Leonhardt, Between Two Jailers: Women’s Experience During Colonialism, War, and Independence in Algeria, 5 Anthós 43 (2013). ↩︎
2. Caroline Sakina Brac, Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa – Algeria, Refworld (Oct. 2005), https://www.refworld.org/reference/countryrep/freehou/2005/en/50693 (on file with the Undergraduate Law Review at FSU). ↩︎
3. Amrita Basu, Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms (Avalon Publ’g 2010). ↩︎
4. Id. ↩︎
5. G.A. Res. 34/180, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (Dec. 18, 1979). ↩︎
6. Id. ↩︎
7. U.N. Treaty Body Database: Algeria, U.N. Hum. Rts. Treaty Bodies, https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/TreatyBodyExternal/Treaty.aspx?CountryID=3&Lang=EN (on file with the Undergraduate Law Review at FSU). ↩︎
8. Id. ↩︎
9. Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol), adopted July 11, 2003, African Union, https://au.int/en/treaties/protocol-african-charter-human-and-peoples-rights-rights-women-africa (on file with the Undergraduate Law Review at FSU). ↩︎