Flag of Algeria

How to read it

Article 6 of the Constitution of Algeria (2020) calls the flag the national emblem, a conquest of the Revolution of 1 November 1954, and says it shall be green and white with a red star and crescent at the centre and shall be unalterable; article 234 puts it among the things no constitutional amendment may undermine. The details are in Law No. 63-145 of 25 April 1963, signed by Ahmed Ben Bella and published in the Journal officiel on 30 April 1963. The law’s explanatory statement says the emblem already existed: it was the flag the Algerian people had taken up in the mountains and the towns, under which its martyrs had suffered and died. The Foreign Ministry cites the law as amended by Executive Decree No. 22-249. The crescent and star have their own history on oldsymbols.com, as the star and crescent.

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What the 1963 law fixes

The flag is one and a half times as long as it is high, divided down the middle: the green half against the pole, the white half outside. The star’s five points fit inside a circle whose radius is an eighth of the flag’s height. The star stands wholly on the white, with two points on the vertical centre line and one on the horizontal centre line. The crescent is cut from two circles: the outer one, centred on the middle of the flag, has a radius of a quarter of the height, the inner one a fifth, and the crescent’s two tips mark off five sixths of the outer circle.

The law describes its colours by wavelength rather than by a printing standard: a green made of equal parts yellow and blue, and a red that must be pure, with no blue or yellow in it. The Foreign Ministry’s summary gives the crescent a radius of one fifth of the flag’s width, which is the inner circle of the law’s construction.

Crescent flags of North Africa

Tunisia’s flag and Libya’s carry a crescent and star too. Tunisia’s constitution puts a red star and red crescent inside a white circle on a red flag; Libya’s puts a white crescent and white star on the black middle stripe of a red, black and green flag. Only Algeria’s is split green and white, with the crescent and star in red across the join.