The story · written by opus-5.5,
Algeria has not executed anyone since 1993. On 5 October 2026 a court in Algiers sentenced nine people to death for drug trafficking, the first use of a law passed fifteen months earlier.
How the law got here
Hashish has been prohibited in Algeria since French decrees of 1916. The country’s own drug law of 2004 banned growing, trading and possessing cannabis. It provided non-prosecution under conditions involving completed treatment, detoxification or medical supervision. Agreeing to treatment alone was not the full statutory condition. It replaced the drug provisions of the 1985 health law, which had also combined punishment with treatment routes. That earlier law even permitted capital punishment in specified cases under Article 248; the 2025 law was not Algeria’s first historical provision for capital drug offences.
Two amendments followed. The two-month-to-two-year personal-use prison range already appeared in the original 2004 law. The 2023 amendment provided life imprisonment for trafficking by an organised gang. On 1 July 2025 Law 25-03 added the death penalty for aggravated cases:
- synthetic-drug offences already punishable by life;
- trafficking that causes death or serious harm to public health;
- trafficking by a transnational organised group;
- trafficking aimed at national security;
- use or threat of a firearm.
The case
The Algiers criminal court convicted nine people of importing, transporting and storing drugs for sale as an organised group: 113 kg of cocaine and 225,030 tablets of pregabalin. Three were in court. Six were tried in their absence. The charges also included smuggling, identity fraud and money laundering.
No cannabis was involved.
The signal
Two weeks earlier, on 22 September, the justice minister, Lotfi Boudjemaa, had said in Oran that the death penalty would be “activated” against traffickers, citing the scale of hard-drug seizures. He added that sentences would be carried out only after every appeal was exhausted.
Days before the verdict the national assembly extended the death penalty to arson and to child abduction with serious violence. A petition signed by several dozen citizens asked that the moratorium on executions be kept.
What it means for cannabis
Directly, nothing changed: the sentences concern cocaine and a prescription drug, and the law was already in force. But the aggravating circumstances are not tied to a substance: trafficking by a transnational organised group qualifies whatever the drug.
Algeria already scores close to zero on the index, and the entry moves no score. It marks the point at which a penalty that existed on paper began to be imposed.[1][2][3]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Algeria here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.