Overview
- Law declares listed colonial-era acts imprescriptible, detailing nuclear tests, extrajudicial executions, widespread torture and systematic plunder, and seeks decontamination of Sahara test sites and restitution of archives and other removed property.
- It makes the French state legally responsible in Algeria’s framing and calls for official apologies and full reparations for material and moral harm from 1830 to 1962.
- Domestic provisions include prison terms and loss of civil and political rights for promoting or denying the criminal nature of colonization, and label the collaboration of harkis as high treason.
- During the same session, deputies passed a nationality-code amendment allowing authorities to strip binational citizens of Algerian nationality for acts harming Algeria’s interests or security abroad.
- The French foreign ministry called the initiative “manifestly hostile,” while specialists say the law carries symbolic and political weight but no binding international force, in a relationship already strained since France backed Morocco’s Western Sahara autonomy plan.