Algeria’s new law declares French colonial rule a crime, seeking accountability and reparations for the colonial past.
Algeria’s parliament has unanimously passed legislation declaring France’s colonisation of the country a crime.
On Wednesday, lawmakers stood in the chamber draped in scarves bearing the national colours, chanting “Long live Algeria” as they approved the bill.
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Parliament also formally demanded an apology and reparations from Paris in a move that seeks to redress attempts to sweep the issue aside.
The law assigns France “legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused”, placing historical accountability at the centre of the state’s legal framework.
While analysts say the law carries no enforceable international weight, its political impact is significant, signalling a rupture in how Algeria engages France over colonial memory.
Parliament Speaker Ibrahim Boughali said the legislation sent “a clear message, both internally and externally, that Algeria’s national memory is neither erasable nor negotiable”, according to the APS state news agency.
The text catalogues crimes of French colonial rule, including nuclear tests, extrajudicial killings, “physical and psychological torture” and the “systematic plundering of resources”.
It also asserts that “full and fair compensation for all material and moral damages caused by French colonisation is an inalienable right of the Algerian state and people”.
‘Crime against humanity’
France brutally ruled Algeria from 1830 to 1962 through a system marked by torture, enforced disappearances, massacres, economic exploitation, mass killings and large-scale deportations and marginalisation of the country’s indigenous Muslim population.
The war of independence between 1954 and 1962 alone left deep scars. Algeria puts the death toll at 1.5 million.
President Emmanuel Macron has previously described the colonisation of Algeria as a “crime against humanity” but has consistently refused to issue a formal apology. He reiterated that position in 2023, saying: “It’s not up to me to ask forgiveness.”
Last week, French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs spokesperson Pascal Confavreux declined to comment on the parliamentary vote, saying he would not engage with “political debates taking place in foreign countries”.
Hosni Kitouni, a colonial history researcher at the University of Exeter, told the AFP news agency that the law has no binding effect on France but stressed that “its political and symbolic significance is important: it marks a rupture in the relationship with France in terms of memory”.
The vote comes amid a diplomatic crisis between the two countries. Algeria and France maintain ties through immigration in particular, but today’s vote comes amid friction in the relationship.
Tensions have been high for months since Paris recognised Morocco’s autonomy plan for resolving the Western Sahara conflict in July 2024. Western Sahara has witnessed armed rebellion since it was annexed by Morocco after the colonial power, Spain, left the territory in 1975.
Algeria supports the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination in Western Sahara and backs the Polisario Front, which rejects Morocco’s autonomy proposal.
In April, the tensions escalated into a crisis after an Algerian diplomat was arrested along with two Algerian nationals in Paris. The diplomatic crisis came barely a week after Macron and Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune expressed their commitment to revive dialogue.
