Religious Law and the Status of Non-Muslim Faiths in Comoros

Comoros' penal code makes proselytizing for any religion other than Sunni Islam a criminal offense, carrying deportation for any foreign national who attempts it, and separately prohibits conversion away from Islam even though the constitution guarantees equal rights regardless of religious belief. Non-Sunni worship is legally barred from public places on the stated grounds that it threatens social cohesion, a restriction that affects the small Roman Catholic, Shia Muslim and Ahmadi Muslim minorities living in the islands.

The United States has placed Comoros on its Special Watch List for religious freedom violations, a tier below the more severe Country of Particular Concern designation but still a formal marker of documented concern. The gap between Comoros' constitutional guarantee of equal rights and its penal code's restrictions on non-Sunni religious practice has drawn attention from international religious freedom monitors as one of the clearer examples in the region of a legal system whose criminal provisions run ahead of its own constitutional text.