The Constitution's Religious Guarantees After the Central African Civil War

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Central African Republic's constitution guarantees freedom of religion and equal protection under the law regardless of religion, requires the head of state to take an oath of office without regard to religion, and separately prohibits religious intolerance and what it calls religious fundamentalism without defining either term. That undefined final clause has drawn attention precisely because the 2013 to the present civil war was fought substantially along the religious lines the constitution otherwise guards against.

No formal establishment exists in Central African law, and the country's legal framework treats religious neutrality as a founding principle rather than a response to the war specifically, since the relevant constitutional language predates the 2013 conflict. What the war changed was the gap between that guarantee and lived reality: a country whose law commits to equal protection regardless of religion spent a decade watching Seleka and anti-balaka forces organize violence substantially along the same religious lines the constitution names as protected.