TUNIS (Reuters) – An Algerian judicial council has ordered the dissolution of a youth association linked to a protest movement and suspended a leftist opposition party, the council said on Thursday.
The Council of State gave no reason for its decision to dissolve Rassemblement Actions Jeunesse Algerienne, which had already been barred from activity, or to suspend the Mouvement Democratique et Social.
Algeria has in recent months stepped up a crackdown on dissent, rights groups say, after having quashed the “Hirak” mass protest movement that mobilised hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in weekly protests from 2019-20.
The protests prompted the military to force president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down after two decades in power and led to the jailing of several prominent figures in his circle on corruption charges.
However, protests continued until authorities imposed a lockdown at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, with weekly demonstrations still demanding that the army quit politics.
Some rights activists and journalists have since been jailed or put under judicial control and banned from travel, and rights groups have been stopped from operating or shut down.
(This story has been corrected to change the name of the association to ‘Rassemblement Actions Jeunesse Algerienne’ from ‘Rassemblement Algerie Jeunesse’ in paragraph 2)
(Reporting by Angus McDowall, Editing by William Maclean)