The Mauritanian LGBTQ community lives under a threat that few Mauritanians speak of and even fewer are willing to confront: the near-total absence of protection, investigation, or justice for those who suffer violence simply because of who they are.

Mauritania offers no legal protections based on sexual orientation or gender identity no anti-discrimination laws, no recognition of hate crimes, no legal recourse of any kind. For LGBT Mauritanians, the state does not merely fail to protect them. In practice, it stands on the side of those who would harm them.

A Pattern of Impunity

When LGBT individuals in Mauritania are attacked, threatened, or killed, there is rarely any meaningful investigation. Deaths go unexamined. Attacks go unreported, because reporting one can itself expose the victim to prosecution. There is no public record, no accountability, and — for the families left behind — no path to justice.

This is not an isolated failure. It mirrors a wider pattern documented across the country, where deaths in police custody and killings during protests have similarly gone without independent investigation. For the LGBT community, this impunity is compounded by the fact that the very identity that made them a target is itself criminalized leaving survivors and grieving families with nowhere safe to turn.

Danger From the State, Not Just Society

For many, the greatest threat comes not from strangers but from the institutions meant to serve them. Harassment, arbitrary arrest, and physical violence by police and security forces are recurring realities, compounded by rejection and violence from family members and community. Because silence is the only available protection, most incidents are never documented at all — which allows the scale of the crisis to remain hidden, and easy to deny.

Even total secrecy offers no guarantee of safety. Many LGBT Mauritanians are known only to themselves — their identity never spoken aloud to another living person — and still they live with the constant threat of exposure, blackmail, and violence. Fear does not require visibility. It only requires a law that makes existence itself a crime.

A Law That Legitimizes Violence

This climate is not accidental it is written into the legal code. Article 308 of the 1984 Penal Code states:

“Any adult Muslim who commits an indecent act or an act against nature with an individual of his sex will face the penalty of death by public stoning.”

A moratorium on executions has held since 1987, but the law remains on the books, unrepealed and fully enforceable. Its continued existence does more than threaten prosecution — it sends an unmistakable signal to society that violence against LGBT people carries no real consequence, because the state itself has already condemned them.

Our Position

We call on Mauritanian authorities to:

• Investigate every reported act of violence or death within the LGBT community, without discrimination or exception
• Repeal Article 308 and all legal provisions criminalizing consensual same-sex relationships
• Establish legal protections against discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity
• End impunity for security forces responsible for the harassment, arrest, and abuse of LGBT individuals

A state that will not investigate the deaths of its own citizens because of who they loved has abandoned its most fundamental obligation: to protect life. Until that changes, Mauritania’s LGBT community will continue to live not as citizens under the law, but as targets of it.