Official finding Southern African muti Muti and body-part belief Tanzania · 2015

Tanzania: the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is 'extremely alarmed' at ritual killings of children with albinism, and finds the shelters protecting them punish children by prolonged exposure to the sun

Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

the practitioners the Committee names as 'witch doctors', at whom it directs the awareness-raising strategy it recommends, the boarding schools and shelters in which children with albinism are placed

Organization

United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, United Republic of Tanzania

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

Children with albinism are killed and mutilated because their body parts are believed to hold power when used in ritual, and the Committee directs the remedy it recommends at the practitioners it calls 'witch doctors' — locating the demand for those body parts in a body of occult practice rather than in ordinary criminality.

Violent occult ideology or sacrifice
Curse or witchcraft threat
Spiritual healing or treatment

Scope decision

This is an inverse-relation record and is filed accordingly. The children were not under the killers' spiritual authority; they were killed because a belief about albinism made their bodies valuable. Records of that shape belong with accusation-driven violence and must never be read as a religious figure harming followers. This is an official finding by a United Nations treaty body, not a criminal proceeding: nobody was prosecuted, no court has adjudicated anything recorded here, and no individual is named or accused. The term 'witch doctors' appears in quotation marks because it is the Committee's own word; this archive does not adopt it as a description of any tradition, and the record makes no claim about African traditional healing generally, the overwhelming majority of whose practitioners are not implicated. The record does not assert a number of killings, because the Committee gives none. The second finding — that the shelters themselves are unhygienic, overcrowded, indefinite, and that children in them are punished by prolonged sun exposure and subjected to threats and sexual abuse — is recorded because the Committee makes it, and is a finding about institutional conditions rather than about ritual practice; the two are held in one record because the Committee treats the shelters as the state's response to the killings. The archive already holds albinism-related records for South Africa, Malawi and Mozambique; this is a separate national finding for Tanzania. The observations describe Tanzania as at January 2015.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2015-01-30 · concluding observations adopted

United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (treaty body established under the Convention on the Rights of the Child). In its concluding observations on the combined third to fifth periodic reports of Tanzania the Committee recorded that it was 'extremely alarmed about the killings of children with albinism, including for ritual purposes, and their social exclusion in the State party', and 'seriously concerned that the root causes of the violence, including murder, mutilations and trafficking of body parts, are insufficiently addressed, that prosecution of offenders is hampered by fear and the reported complicity of some State authorities, and that children with albinism have been placed in boarding schools/shelters for children with special needs'. On those shelters it recorded reports that they 'while offering immediate protection, are not temporary as originally intended and are unhygienic, overcrowded, and have limited human and financial resources', that the children in them 'are separated from their families and segregated from their community', and that they 'are punished, especially by prolonged exposure to the sun, leading to the rapid development of skin cancer' and 'are also subjected to threats and even to sexual abuse'. It urged the State party to adopt a comprehensive strategy 'including awareness-raising, especially in the most affected areas, targeting "witch doctors"'.

Documented coercion mechanisms

the killing, mutilation and trafficking of body parts of children with albinism for ritual purposes
the reported complicity of some State authorities, which the Committee finds hampers prosecution alongside fear
indefinite placement of children in shelters that separate them from their families and segregate them from their communities
punishment inside those shelters by prolonged exposure to the sun, leading to rapid development of skin cancer

Cited record

Sources

un treaty body concluding observations United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Concluding observations on the combined third to fifth periodic reports of the United Republic of Tanzania, CRC/C/TZA/CO/3-5 (adopted 30 January 2015, issued 3 March 2015).: The Committee's own concluding observations, retrieved as PDF from the United Nations documents system and read in full. Paragraph 29 records that the Committee 'is nevertheless extremely alarmed about the killings of children with albinism, including for ritual purposes, and their social exclusion in the State party', and is 'seriously concerned that the root causes of the violence, including murder, mutilations and trafficking of body parts, are insufficiently addressed, that prosecution of offenders is hampered by fear and the reported complicity of some State authorities'. Paragraph 30 records that the shelters 'are not temporary as originally intended and are unhygienic, overcrowded', that children in them 'are separated from their families and segregated from their community', that they 'are punished, especially by prolonged exposure to the sun, leading to the rapid development of skin cancer', and that they 'are also subjected to threats and even to sexual abuse'. Paragraph 31 urges a comprehensive strategy 'targeting "witch doctors"'.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=CRC%2FC%2FTZA%2FCO%2F3-5&l=en&t=pdf Corpus classification: un-treaty-body; evidentiary role: concluding-observations.
Retrieval: 2026-07-29 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-29 (CRC channel; UN document retrieved directly from documents.un.org, PDF magic bytes verified, converted with pdftotext and paragraphs 29, 30 and 31 checked verbatim before drafting)

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