Researching the Law of Madagascar

At a glance

Legal system family

Civil law on the French model. The Secretariat General of the Government describes three separate orders of jurisdiction under a Cour supreme composed of a Cour de cassation, a Conseil d'Etat and a Cour des comptes.³

Official gazette

Journal Officiel de la Republique de Madagascar. The government's legal information service holds references to texts that appeared from 1897 onward and full texts from 1998 onward.¹

Constitution in force

Constitution de la IVeme Republique. Filtering the National Assembly's register of texts by its own type selector for Constitution returns one entry and then the page footer: reference CT-2010, state promulgated.⁴

Language of the authoritative text

Malagasy and French. The Secretariat General of the Government gives Malagasy as the national language and Malagasy and French as the official languages.³

A Malagasy statute does not become binding on a date. It becomes binding when a physical object arrives somewhere. Article 3 of the 1962 ordinance that governs promulgation and publication provides that laws become obligatory one clear day after the arrival of the Journal officiel, and the arrival is established at the sous-prefecture by the striking of a date stamp. Commencement is therefore a fact about distribution, evidenced by an administrative act in a particular office, and two localities can in principle be under the same statute on different days.

The rest of that ordinance is short enough to read in five minutes and answers most of what a foreign researcher needs. Article 1 makes a law executory by virtue of promulgation in constitutional form. Article 2 makes publication consist in insertion in the Journal officiel de la Republique, and article 6 says the same of decrees. Article 5 deals with corrections, and it is stricter than most: a rectification to a law already published in the Journal officiel has no effect unless it has itself been specially promulgated, unless all it does is repair a purely material error, fill an obvious omission, or bring the published text into line with the promulgated one. A researcher who finds a Malagasy text with a rectificatif attached should read article 5 before assuming the correction operates.

Article 4 is the one that will surprise a reader used to European practice. Where the President declares urgency, and without prejudice to publication in the Journal officiel, a law becomes obligatory throughout the territory as soon as it is posted on the noticeboard of administrative acts at the sous-prefecture. The same article requires that the text have been brought to public knowledge beforehand, and it names the ways: by radio broadcast, by kabary, or by any other means of publicity. Kabary is Malagasy formal public speech. It sits in the statute alongside radio as a recognised mode of promulgation, and a legal system that names it is telling a researcher something about how law is expected to reach people.

The service that publishes all this is CNLEGIS, run from the Secretariat General of the Government under the Prime Minister's office. It names the gazette as the Journal Officiel de la Republique de Madagascar, states that the ordinance governing publication is Ordonnance n. 62-041 of 19 September 1962, and cites that ordinance to its own gazette issue, J.O. n. 244 of 28 September 1962 at page 1989, which is a small courtesy most government sites do not extend. Its collection holds references to texts that appeared from 1897 onward and full texts from 1998 onward. Those two dates are the practical boundary of what can be done from a desk: before 1998 a researcher gets a reference and has to find the issue.

The Journal Officiel section of that same site opens a user login rather than a document. Nothing behind it was read for this page, and nothing on this page rests on it.

The gazette itself is printed by the Imprimerie Nationale, which sits under the Ministry of Economy and Finance, describes itself as a public service of an industrial and commercial character with an annexed budget, and gives as its first mission the production of all official publications, the Journaux Officiels and the Bulletins Officiels d'Annonces Legales. Among the products it offers customers is a subscription to the journal officiel. That is worth registering rather than skimming past: the gazette is a printed object you can buy, and the commencement rule in article 3 turns on a printed object arriving somewhere.

The Constitution in force is the Constitution de la IVeme Republique, and the cleanest sourced statement of that comes from the National Assembly rather than from a constitutional page. Its register of legislative texts carries a type selector, offering Constitution alongside Reglement interieur, Projet de loi, Loi ordinaire, Proposition de loi and Loi organique. Set it to Constitution and the register returns one entry and then the footer: reference CT-2010, state promulgated. There is a trap on that record worth naming. The only date it carries is a date de depot of 18 May 2026. That is the day the text was entered into the Assembly's register, not the day it was promulgated, and a reader skimming the record could easily carry the wrong year away from it. The text itself is offered as a PDF.

The court that decides constitutional questions is the Haute Cour Constitutionnelle, and its decisions repay reading even by someone with no constitutional question. Take the one cached for this page, decision 18-HCC/D3 of 21 August 2026, on a law about the private property of the State and the decentralised territorial collectivities. Before it reaches the law at all it works through a chain of Vu recitals naming everything it considered: an earlier decision of its own, an advisory opinion on the end of the Senate's mandate, ordonnance n. 2001-003 of 18 November 2001, which is the organic law on the court, and the court's own rules of procedure as amended in 2021. Reading the recitals of a recent decision is often the faster route to knowing which instruments are currently operative in a corner of Malagasy law.

Alongside that court sits the ordinary judiciary, which the Secretariat General describes as resting on two levels of jurisdiction across three separate orders, judicial, administrative and financial, under a Cour supreme made up of a Cour de cassation, a Conseil d'Etat and a Cour des comptes. Anyone who has worked in French law will recognise the shape immediately, and the recognition is useful: the division of a case between the ordinary and the administrative order works on familiar lines.

On language the government is explicit, and the answer has two halves. Malagasy is the national language; the official languages are Malagasy and French. Everything cited on this page was published in French, which is one of the two and not a courtesy edition of the other. A researcher should expect to meet Malagasy as well, and this guide has not established how the two versions of a given text relate to each other or which governs if they differ. It is one of the two official languages, not a courtesy edition. The France page in this guide covers the arrangement Madagascar's own is descended from.

Primary sources online

• CNLEGIS (opens an external site)The government's legal information service. The Journal Officiel rubric itself opens a user login.
• Lois et reglements, articles 1 a 7 de l'Ordonnance n. 62-041 (opens an external site)The publication and commencement rules in full, including the date stamp at the sous-prefecture.
• Assemblee Nationale, Textes (opens an external site)The register of bills and laws, with a type selector. Set to Constitution it returns one entry.
• Haute Cour Constitutionnelle (opens an external site)Decisions, advisory opinions and election results, in French. The court is the publisher of its own reports.
• Imprimerie Nationale (opens an external site)The state printer. Its first stated mission is the production of the Journaux Officiels.

Reviewed 2026-08-30. 7 sources cited on this page.