Apostasy Law and the Legacy of Slavery in Mauritania

Mauritania's criminal code, revised in 2018, makes both apostasy and blasphemy capital offenses for Muslims, one of a small number of countries to codify a mandatory death sentence for leaving Islam. The government has never carried out an execution under the provision, and courts may treat an individual's repentance as a mitigating factor, but several blasphemy prosecutions in the 2010s and 2020s drew sustained diplomatic pressure from the United States and other governments, keeping the law a live point of international scrutiny even without an execution to enforce it.

Mauritania's other unresolved religious controversy concerns slavery, only formally criminalized in 2007 and, by the documented account of rights monitors, still practiced in isolated cases today. Hereditary slavery in Mauritania has historically been defended by some local religious authorities on grounds drawn from Maliki jurisprudence, an argument abolitionist Mauritanian scholars and activists directly contest as a misreading of Islamic law rather than an authentic application of it, making the country's own religious scholars central participants on both sides of the debate.