Other Witchcraft- and sorcery-accusation violence State or organised anti-witchcraft campaign Central African Republic · 2022

Central African Republic: articles 149–150 make witchcraft a crime, and half the women in Bimbo prison are held for it

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Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

the Central African state, prosecuting and convicting people for 'pratiques de charlatanisme et de sorcellerie' under articles 149 and 150 of the Penal Code, judges who, on the study's findings, decide such cases by reference to their own beliefs and accept a confession as conclusive proof, religious bodies whose increased involvement in the 'fight' against witchcraft the study records after 2013

Organization

Central African Republic Penal Code, articles 149 and 150, Bimbo women's prison, Central African Republic, Avocats Sans Frontières — study author and legal-aid provider

Archive classification

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

This record is the INVERSE of the archive's core criterion and is included as such. No spiritual authority is the perpetrator here: the people convicted are those ACCUSED of witchcraft, and the coercive authority is the state's, exercised through a criminal offence that cannot be disproved. It is recorded because it documents the same belief system operating through an official institution rather than a private practitioner — and because the mechanism the study identifies is the mirror image of the one this archive usually traces. Where a healer's claim makes a demand unrefusable, here a court's conviction makes an accusation permanent: the judgment certifies the accused as a witch, and that certification follows them out of prison. Accusations concentrate on isolated and elderly women, which is the same victim profile as the curse-removal frauds recorded elsewhere in this corpus, reached from the opposite direction.

Curse or witchcraft threat

Scope decision

CATEGORY: this is `accusation-violence` / `persecution`, not a core record, and `convictedParty` is `other` because the convictions run against the accused rather than against any spiritual authority. A reader filtering this corpus for convictions of spiritual authorities must not pick this up. EVIDENCE TIER: the source is an NGO field study and annual report by Avocats Sans Frontières, not a judicial document. It is recorded as an `official-finding` `institutional-event` on that basis — it establishes a documented pattern, not an adjudicated individual outcome, and no individual case, defendant or victim is named or asserted here. The Bimbo prison figure ('half of the women in prison are condemned for alleged witchcraft offences') is ASF's own statement from its 2021 annual report and is reproduced as such rather than as an independently verified count; a much broader country-wide proportion is widely repeated in secondary coverage of CAR; it is deliberately NOT reproduced in this record, because the only sources located for it are secondary and the figure ASF itself gives is specific to one women's prison. Articles 149 and 150 are cited as the study cites them; the archive has not read the Penal Code text directly. Some secondary sources state witchcraft is capital-eligible in CAR while most sentences are one to five years; that is not reproduced here for want of a primary source. The Central African Republic had no record in this corpus before this one, and the two prior mentions of the country were incidental — a Senegalese charge and a Belgian priest transferred to CAR post-conviction. Placed at the country centroid because the finding is national in scope.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2022-11-14 · documented pattern of prosecution and conviction, described in an NGO field study; not an individual adjudication

Central African Republic — national criminal justice system. Avocats Sans Frontières, reporting from its 2021 annual report and from a commissioned study on the judicial treatment of the offence, records that the practice of charlatanism and witchcraft is a crime under the Central African Penal Code, that articles 149 and 150 punish 'charlatanism or witchcraft practices likely to disturb public order or harm people or property' including practices causing serious injury, permanent disability or death, and that at Bimbo women's prison half of the women held are convicted of alleged witchcraft offences. The study finds that the legal vagueness of the offence is acknowledged within the Central African judiciary and produces arbitrary decision-making; that judges tend to rely on their own convictions and beliefs; that, faced with the impossibility of material proof, most judicial actors treat the accused person's confession as conclusive regardless of the motives for making it; and that social pressure and the invocation of public order influence and divert judicial decisions. It further finds that prosecution is itself harmful: by convicting, the court attests to the reality of the person's witchcraft, so that the convicted person remains vulnerable to further convictions and further violence even after release, while acquittal may prompt a distrustful population to seek justice for itself.

Documented coercion mechanisms

a criminal offence defined so vaguely that no material proof is possible — «charlatanisme ou pratiques de sorcellerie susceptibles de troubler l'ordre public ou de porter atteinte aux personnes ou aux biens»
confession treated as the ultimate evidence irrespective of why it was given, the study noting confessions are often made for social appeasement or personal protection
conviction itself certifying the accusation: the court's finding attests to the reality of the person's witchcraft, leaving them exposed to further prosecution and further violence after release
acquittal offering no protection either, the study recording that a distrustful population may then take justice into its own hands
accusations falling disproportionately on isolated and elderly women, and used to remove people who have become undesirable in a community

Cited record

Sources

ngo field study ngo report Avocats Sans Frontières (5 January 2023) 'Witchcraft representations and judicial treatment of the offence of Charlatanism and Witchcraft Practices in the Central African Republic', summarising the commissioned study of the same name.: ASF records that «In the Central African Penal Code, Articles 149 and 150 condemn 'charlatanism or witchcraft practices likely to disturb public order or harm people or property', including practices that cause 'serious injury or permanent disability' or 'death'», and that accusations based on «these two vague and imprecise articles» are common and «frequently lead to an outburst of violence by popular vindictiveness against the accused person: exclusion, lynching, or even, in the worst case, brutal execution», disproportionately affecting «the vulnerable and isolated, especially elderly women». On judicial treatment: «Judges tend to rely on their own convictions and beliefs when dealing with witchcraft cases», and «faced with the difficulty of providing material proof of an act of witchcraft, most judicial actors consider the confession of the accused person as the ultimate evidence, regardless of the motives of the accused in making the confession, which is often used for purposes of social appeasement and/or personal protection». On the effect of prosecution: «By prosecuting a person for CWP, the court attests to the reality of her or his witchcraft and the convicted person will remain vulnerable to further convictions and even further violence (even after release from prison)», while «In the event of an acquittal, the population, mostly distrustful of the judiciary, may seek justice for themselves».
ngo field study ngo report Avocats Sans Frontières (14 November 2022) 'The penalisation of charlatanism and witchcraft practices: An obstacle to the realisation of the rights of women and minors in the Central African Republic', from the ASF Annual Report 2021.: ASF states that «In the Central African Republic (CAR), the practice of charlatanism and witchcraft is considered a crime under the penal code», that «The prosecution of suspected 'sorcery' practitioners frequently leads to serious human rights violations and systematically impacts women and children», and — the figure recorded in this record — that «At the Bimbo women's prison, half of the women in prison are condemned for alleged witchcraft offences». It adds that «People suspected of witchcraft are regularly subjected to humiliation and corporal punishment, sometimes resulting in death», and that the repression «can originate in formal justice but also in popular vindictiveness».

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://asf.be/witchcraft-representations-and-judicial-treatment-of-the-offence-of-charlatanism-and-witchcraft-practices-in-car/ Corpus classification: ngo-field-study; evidentiary role: documented-pattern-finding. Not a judicial document and not recorded as one.
Retrieval: 2026-07-29 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-29 (Sahel coverage audit prompted by the project owner; both ASF pages read in full after WebFetch returned HTTP 403 and a browser user-agent via curl succeeded; the statutory articles, the confession-as-proof finding, the conviction-certifies-witchcraft finding and the Bimbo prison figure taken verbatim; the broader country-wide proportion repeated in secondary coverage deliberately NOT recorded for want of a primary source)
Source and tier basis: https://asf.be/the-penalisation-of-charlatanism-and-witchcraft-practices-an-obstacle-to-the-realisation-of-the-rights-of-women-and-minors-in-the-central-african-republic/ Corpus classification: ngo-field-study; evidentiary role: annual-report-finding. Not a judicial document and not recorded as one.
Retrieval: 2026-07-29 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-29 (Sahel coverage audit; ASF Annual Report 2021 extract read in full via curl with a browser user-agent after WebFetch returned HTTP 403; the Bimbo women's prison figure and the formal-justice/popular-vindictiveness distinction taken verbatim)

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