Nosy Be Lawyers Face Threats Over Land Cases, Bar Responds

Death threats, privacy violations and xenophobic remarks have circulated on social media for several weeks against five lawyers practicing on Nosy Be, the island in northwest Madagascar whose turquoise waters serve as the country’s tourist showcase. The intimidation followed court decisions in land cases, and it has now drawn a formal response from the bar association, the Ordre des avocats.

“There is content likely to seriously harm the security of colleagues on the ground, their independence and the free exercise of the right of defense,” said Maître Ferdinand Ranary Rakotoarisoa, the association’s president. “Dissatisfaction with a court decision must find its answer in the remedies provided by law, and never in threats or in the intimidation of a lawyer carrying out his mission. It is in that spirit, too, that we recall that social networks cannot constitute a lawless zone.”

Behind the intimidation lies a broader problem of delivery. The courts and the land administration inspire deep distrust in Madagascar. In 2025, both ranked among the public services most frequently denounced as corrupt in grievances collected by the Independent Anti-Corruption Bureau, known as Bianco. That record weighs on how rulings in land files are received, and it may help explain why dissatisfaction with a judgment spills beyond the courtroom and onto those who argued the case.

Nosy Be itself, off the northwest coast, is gripped by recurring land conflicts. Mamy Rakotondrainibe, president of the Collectif Tany, an organization that campaigns for the defense of Malagasy land, described a terrain where formal protection counts for little. “It is above all the law of the strongest that prevails,” she said. “Small farmers and landowners, or those who have no official land documents, for example, are truly at the mercy of all the predators. We see more and more Malagasy stepping in to seize land. We do not really know whether it is for themselves, in the long term, or to sell, or to collaborate in one way or another with foreign investors.”

Her collective is pressing for an institutional answer: a specialized jurisdiction, equipped with investigators and judges dedicated to land disputes. The idea is to build dedicated capacity for a category of cases that the existing system handles poorly in the eyes of its users. The sensitivity of the issue was on display recently, when the withdrawal of a controversial land project on the island of Sakatia, at Nosy Be, brought relief on the island.

For now, the bar association has drawn the line it intends to defend. A court decision can be contested through the remedies the law provides; the lawyer who argued the case is not a legitimate target. Whether the institutions serving Nosy Be can produce rulings that are accepted, and shield the people who make the argument, remains the open question hanging over the island.