Fighting between the national army, alongside Russian mercenaries and Rwandan forces, and elements of the Coalition of Patriots for Change (Coalition des patriotes pour le changement, CPC) continued outside of major towns across the country. Civilians continue to be targeted and violence, while decreased, affected half of the population (2.8 million people) that require direct humanitarian assistance, including 1.3 million children. According to the United Nations, seven out of ten children do not attend school regularly, and around 1.2 million children are facing difficulties accessing education.
Security conditions hampered the delivery of humanitarian relief, especially in the eastern part of the country.
Mercenaries from Wagner, a Russian state-funded private military company, are deployed in the country. The UN reported several instances in which Wagner mercenaries participated in active fighting and were implicated in serious human rights abuses.
Civic, Political, and Media Space
Political space is increasingly restricted after a 2023 constitutional referendum removed term limits for the president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra. Political opponents were targeted in 2024 in the aftermath of the referendum campaign, which saw crackdowns on civil society, the media, and opposition political parties. Local elections, originally slated for October 2024 and the country’s first in over 36 years, were delayed until at least April 2025 due to lack of funding. The presidential vote is also due in 2025. The main opposition coalition has announced it will boycott the local and presidential elections without meaningful reform.
Security Conditions
The country remained dangerous for humanitarian actors, with 97 incidents ranging from harassment to armed robberies of humanitarian actors registered between January and August.
A UN Security Council arms embargo, imposed on the country since 2013, was lifted in July.
The UN peacekeeping mission, MINUSCA, deployed 13,394 military peacekeepers and 2,415 police across many parts of the country. Under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the mission is authorized to take all necessary means to protect the civilian population from threat of physical violence and to “implement a mission-wide protection strategy.” In November 2023, the UN Security Council extended the mandate of the mission for another year. In September, the government signed a “handover protocol” with the UN to transfer children associated with armed forces and groups to civilian authorities.
Both the Azande Ani Kpi Gbe, a Zandé-based ethnic militia based in the southeast, and the Union for Peace in the Central African Republic (Union pour la Paix en Centrafrique, UPC), a member of the CPC coalition, targeted civilians in the southeast border region. The Azande Ani Kpi Gbe specifically targeted Muslims presumed to be sympathetic to the UPC.
The armed group Return, Reclamation, Rehabilitation, or 3R, launched attacks on civilians outside of towns along the northwest border with Cameroon. In July, the group killed at least a dozen outside of Bocaranga. In April, the group executed at least 16 farmers outside of Bohong.
A report by the National Commission on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Commission nationale des droits de l’homme et des libertés fondamentales), stated that in February Russian forces fired at inmates at a prison in Bambari, killing two inmates and injuring two others.
An attack on a gold mine in Koki in October 2023, allegedly by Wagner mercenaries, killed at least a dozen miners, and has yet to be investigated.
Justice for Serious Crimes
In September, the Special Criminal Court (SCC)—a war crimes court that is part of the domestic justice system but has both national and international staff and benefits from extensive UN and other international assistance—arrested and charged Abakar Zakaria Hamid, known as “SG,” a former Seleka leader, for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes linked to the 2014 attack at the Notre-Dame church, which had been serving as a displacement camp in Bangui, the capital. Hamid joined seven other individuals who had already been arrested and charged in relation to this case.
Investigating judges at the SCC in September referred the case against Bozizé, Eugène Barret Ngaïkosset, Vianney Semndiro, and Firmin Junior Danboy to the court’s trial chamber. Ngaïkosset, Semndiro, and Danboy were in pretrial detention through 2024 and appealed the referral. Bozizé, who first fled in 2013, returned to the country in 2019 and emerged as a key leader of the CPC before going back into hiding in Guinea-Bissau, where he remains. According to the rules of the SCC, he can be tried in absentia.
In July, the SCC arrested three suspects, Yvon Nzelété, Narcisse Christian Gomani Niakari, and Roger Linet for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in the Mboumou province in 2017. In September, the court extended by one year the pretrial detention of Abdoulaye Hissène, who was arrested in 2023 in relation to the same case. He appealed the decision.
In June, the SCC arrested a former anti-balaka leader, Edmond Beïna, on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes allegedly committed in 2014 in Guen, Gadzi, and Djomo, in the Mambéré-Kadéï province in the southwestern part of the country. Beïna is accused with a fellow armed group leader, Maturin Kombo, who was arrested in 2022, and three other co-accused who were charged with crimes arising out of the same facts. In November the International Criminal Court (ICC) made public that it also issued an arrest warrant for Beïna in 2018. Central African authorities have challenged the admissibility of the case before the ICC.
Also in June, the court started its third trial, which relates to crimes allegedly committed by the Popular Front for the Renaissance of the Central African Republic (Front populaire pour la renaissance de la Centrafrique, FPRC), in 2020 in the town of Ndélé.
In April, the SCC issued an arrest warrant for former president François Bozizé. He is charged with crimes against humanity allegedly committed between 2009 and 2013, by the Presidential Guard and other security services at the Bossembélé military training center. The center was known as “Guantanamo,” and lies north of capital Bangui.
At the ICC, the separate trials of Seleka commander Mahamat Said Abdel Kani, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Bangui in 2013, and anti-balaka leaders Patrice-Edouard Ngaïssona and Alfred Yékatom, both charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed between in 2013 and 2014, continued.
In September, ICC judges held a hearing to assess potential compensation for Maxime Mokom, a former military coordinator of a group of anti-balaka militia. Mokom was released by the ICC in October 2023 after the court’s prosecutor withdrew charges against him, citing a lack of evidence and difficulty in securing witnesses.
In April, Dieudonné Ndomaté, an anti-balaka leader and former tourism minister, was arrested in Cameroon and extradited to the Central African Republic where he awaits trial before a domestic criminal court.
Displacement and Humanitarian Needs
The civilian population continued to pay a heavy price for violence in 2024. The total number of displaced people remained high because of fighting. Over 1.2 million Central Africans, according to the UN, were either refugees in neighboring countries (750, 000) or internally displaced (451,000) as of June. Conditions for internally displaced people and refugees, many of whom stay in camps, are inadequate. As of September 2024, over 29,000 Sudanese refugees had fled into the Central African Republic since the outbreak of Sudan’s conflict in April 2023. Assistance to internally displaced people was seriously hampered by attacks on humanitarians and general insecurity in the country.
About 2.8 million people, out of a population of 6.1 million, needed humanitarian assistance. The humanitarian response plan was underfunded, with a budget gap of about US$175 million as of September.