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Algeria decided to end the agreement signed with France in December 2013, which allowed holders of diplomatic passports or travel service without visa between the two countries. The decision, officially notified at the French Embassy and published in the Official Journal on September 17, now requires French diplomats to request a visa to enter Algeria.
“As of August 7, 2025, a written notification was sent to the Embassy of the French Republic in Algeria, informing it of the Algerian government’s decision to denounce the agreement concluded in Algiers on December 16, 2013,” said the same note. This decision follows the suspension of the agreement by the French party. In response, Algiers informed Paris, on the same day, “of its decision to submit, with immediate effect, the French nationals holding diplomatic passports or service, to the obligation to obtain a visa,” said the same source.
This denunciation is the direct consequence of a sequence of provocations from Paris. On February 13 and 26, 2025, several Algerian officials holders of diplomatic passports were repressed upon their arrival in France, in flagrant violation of the 2013 agreement. Instead of assuming these shortcomings, French President Emmanuel Macron chose, in a letter addressed to his Prime Minister on August 6, to order the unilateral suspension of the agreement, arguing the need to show “firmness”.
Faced with this attitude deemed contemptuous and unilateral, Algiers replied by purely and simply denouncing the agreement. “Algeria does not give in to pressure, threat and blackmail, whatever they are,” said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs last month, recalling that Algiers was historically at the origin of any request for the conclusion of a bilateral visa exemption agreement for the benefit of diplomatic passports and service holders.
“Most times, it was France, and it alone, which has been at the origin of such a request. By deciding the suspension of this agreement, France offers Algeria the appropriate opportunity to announce, on the other hand, the pure and simple denunciation of this same agreement. In accordance with the provisions of article 08 of the said Agreement, the Algerian government will incessantly notify the French government this denunciation by diplomatic route, “said the Ministry of AE.
At the same time, the Algerian authorities denounce a broader drift of French politics. The systematic refusal of granting visa -type visas to Algerian students and families in regrouping is perceived as a discriminatory measure, in contradiction with the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950 and with the bilateral agreement of 1968 on the traffic and the stay of Algerians in France. A restriction which directly threatens tens of thousands of students and weighs on the Algerian diaspora, but also on French companies installed in Algeria and their expatriate managers.
For Algiers, France has chosen to trample its own international commitments. The list is long: the 1968 agreement on traffic and employment, the 1974 consular convention, and the 2013 agreement on special passports. Paris, on the other hand, insistently brandishes the 1994 agreement on the readmission of migrants in an irregular situation, which has become the obsession with French political currents, in particular those close to the extreme right. Algiers denounces the denaturation of this text, used as a blackmail instrument and not as a balanced cooperation framework.
Macron’s letter to his Prime Minister illustrates this drift. It presents France as respectful of its obligations, while designating Algeria as a fault. “Nothing is further from reality,” said the department of Ahmed Attaf.
In reality, he underlines, it is France which violates its own laws and which has refused for more than two years to accredit several Algerian diplomats, including three general consuls. On this file as on others, Algiers recalls that he only applies the principle of reciprocity.
However, the visa crisis, the Elysée leaving the threat of a revision of the 1968 agreement, presented as a political weapon for internal use. A strategy that echoes the extreme right electoral speeches and lobbies hostile to Algeria, but which, according to Algiers, can only lead to an additional hardening of relations.
Algeria considers that real bilateral litigation remain elsewhere: colonial memory, restitution of archives, confiscated property, compensation related to nuclear tests … So many files that Paris avoids approaching head -on.