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Algeria's national assembly has approved legislation that introduces capital punishment for anyone convicted of deliberately setting fire to forests, woods or agricultural fields, a direct response to a wave of deadly blazes that tore through the country's northern regions during an extreme heatwave. The bill, passed by members of the lower chamber on Thursday, also extends the death penalty to cases of child abduction involving torture, sexual assault or mutilation, widening the scope of capital offences in a country that has not carried out an execution in more than three decades.
The move represents one of the most severe legal responses to environmental crime anywhere in North Africa, and it underscores how profoundly the recent fires have shaken the Algerian state. More than one hundred separate fires erupted across the north-east of the country as temperatures soared, overwhelming civil protection units and prompting authorities to treat the outbreaks as something closer to a security emergency than a seasonal natural disaster.
President Abdelmadjid Tebboune personally directed the justice ministry to draft the changes to the criminal code, signalling that the issue has risen to the top of the national agenda. His instruction came after the scale of the destruction became clear, with entire forested areas reduced to ash and communities in the Bouira mountains and surrounding provinces forced to flee their homes.
Under the newly adopted law, a person found guilty of intentionally igniting a forest, woodland or field could be sentenced to death. The provision applies specifically to deliberate acts of arson, distinguishing them from accidental ignitions, which remain subject to existing penalties. The legislation also broadens the category of child kidnapping that qualifies for capital punishment, covering abductions in which victims are subjected to torture, sexual violence or physical mutilation.
Official figures place the death toll from the fires at twelve. However, that number has been disputed by independent journalists and local news outlets, which argue the true human cost is far higher. Investigative reporter Nozha Khelalef has been compiling the names of the dead using death notices published by grieving families as well as information released by some local authorities. Her count, published on the independent website Twala, places the toll at two hundred. The gap between the two figures reflects a broader pattern of scepticism among Algerian media and civil society about official accounting in the aftermath of large-scale disasters.
Presenting the legislation to parliament, Justice Minister Lotfi Boudjemaa framed the death penalty as a necessary and proportionate instrument. Speaking to lawmakers in remarks reported by the news agency AFP, he described the adoption of capital punishment for these offences as the appropriate legal response to curb such crimes. Boudjemaa went further, arguing that arson had effectively reached the level of organised crime, and he pointed to investigations that suggest possible connections to foreign parties. That assertion, if substantiated, would transform the fires from a domestic emergency into a matter of national security and external interference.
The minister's claim echoes a recurring theme in Algerian public discourse, in which major wildfires are sometimes attributed to coordinated or politically motivated actors rather than to accident, agricultural burning or the effects of a warming climate. Human rights organisations have long criticised Algeria's use of the death penalty in principle, and the expansion of capital offences is likely to draw scrutiny from international bodies that monitor judicial practice in the region. Algeria retains the death penalty in its penal code for a range of offences including terrorism and certain violent crimes, but a moratorium on executions has effectively been in place since 1993, meaning the sentence exists on paper without being carried out.
The legislation must still pass through the upper house, the Council of the Nation, before being formally ratified by the president. Given that the bill originated from a presidential directive and was approved by the lower chamber, ratification is widely expected. Once in force, it would give prosecutors a powerful new tool, though the practical effect of a death sentence in a country that has not executed anyone in over thirty years remains uncertain.
The fires themselves reflect a wider regional crisis. Algeria experiences forest fires every summer, but experts note that climate change has sharply intensified their frequency and severity in recent years, with longer droughts, higher temperatures and stronger winds creating conditions in which small ignitions can rapidly become uncontrollable infernos. The same dynamics have been observed across the Mediterranean basin, from Greece to Tunisia to southern Europe, where fire seasons have grown longer and more destructive.
For communities in the affected provinces, the immediate consequences extend well beyond the loss of life. Burned forests mean degraded soil, heightened risk of flash flooding, the destruction of olive groves and other agricultural livelihoods, and the displacement of families who may never return to their villages. Rebuilding will require substantial investment in reforestation, firebreaks, early warning systems and better-equipped civil protection services.
The political significance of the new law is difficult to overstate. By attaching the ultimate penalty to arson, Algeria's leadership is signalling that it regards the fires as an act of aggression against the state, not merely a natural calamity. Whether that framing succeeds in deterring future attacks, or whether it deflects attention from the structural and climatic factors that make Algeria increasingly fire-prone, will be the central question in the months ahead. What is clear is that a season of unprecedented burning has now reshaped the country's criminal code in ways that will be debated for years.
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