Official finding Southern African muti Muti and body-part belief Côte d'Ivoire · 2019

Côte d'Ivoire: the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child finds children with albinism killed and abducted for ritual purposes, and that the violations against them are not recorded as such

Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

those who commission and carry out ritual killings of children with albinism, whom the Committee urges the State party to punish

Organization

United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Republic of Côte d'Ivoire

Archive classification

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

Children with albinism are killed and abducted because of beliefs about the power held by their bodies, which the Committee describes as superstitious beliefs to be countered by awareness-raising; the demand that drives the killings is located in that belief rather than in ordinary acquisitive crime.

Violent occult ideology or sacrifice
Curse or witchcraft threat
Prosperity, divination, or curse-removal claim

Scope decision

This is an inverse-relation record and is filed accordingly. The children were not under their attackers' spiritual authority; they were harmed because a belief about albinism made their bodies valuable. Records of that shape must never be read as a religious figure abusing 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. The Committee's finding that violations against these children 'are not identified as such for the purpose of data collection' is recorded because it is a distinct harm in itself: where the state does not count a category of victim, the scale of the harm cannot be established, and no figure is asserted here for that reason. The record makes no claim about African traditional religion or healing generally, the overwhelming majority of whose practitioners are not implicated. The archive holds albinism records for South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania; this is a separate national finding for Côte d'Ivoire. The observations describe the country as at May 2019.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2019-05-21 · 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 second periodic report of Côte d'Ivoire the Committee 'note[d] with serious concern that children with albinism are victims of ritual killings, abductions, abandonment and stigmatization, that the policy aimed at protecting the rights of children with albinism is inadequately implemented and that the violations against child victims are not identified as such for the purpose of data collection and further interventions'. It urged the State party 'to prevent and combat the killing and kidnapping of and attacks against children with albinism, protect and provide them with psychological support, redress, rehabilitation and legal assistance, punish those responsible for such crimes, and strengthen awareness-raising campaigns against superstitious beliefs concerning children with albinism'.

Documented coercion mechanisms

ritual killing and abduction of children because of beliefs about albinism
abandonment and stigmatisation of children with albinism
failure to identify violations against these children as such for the purpose of data collection, so that the harm is not counted

Cited record

Sources

un treaty body concluding observations United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Concluding observations on the second periodic report of Côte d'Ivoire, CRC/C/CIV/CO/2 (adopted 21 May 2019).: The Committee's own concluding observations, retrieved as PDF from the United Nations documents system and read in full. Paragraph 35 records that the Committee 'notes with serious concern that children with albinism are victims of ritual killings, abductions, abandonment and stigmatization, that the policy aimed at protecting the rights of children with albinism is inadequately implemented and that the violations against child victims are not identified as such for the purpose of data collection and further interventions'. Paragraph 36 urges the State party to 'prevent and combat the killing and kidnapping of and attacks against children with albinism... punish those responsible for such crimes, and strengthen awareness-raising campaigns against superstitious beliefs concerning children with albinism'.

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%2FCIV%2FCO%2F2&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 35 and 36 checked verbatim before drafting)

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