Algeria Senate demands changes to law criminalising French rule

Algeria’s Senate on Thursday demanded changes to a law criminalising French colonial rule, including provisions on reparations, nearly a month after parliament passed the legislation.

On December 24, parliament’s lower house unanimously approved the law declaring France’s colonisation of Algeria from 1830 to 1962 a crime and demanding an apology and reparations.

But the Senate said Thursday some articles of the text did not fully reflect the official approach set out by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who had said Algeria did not need financial reparations from France.

This means a joint committee including members of both chambers will now review the disputed provisions before finalising the text, as the Senate cannot amend laws passed by the lower house.

France has called the bill “clearly hostile”, coming at a time of diplomatic friction with Algeria.

Relations soured in late 2024 when France officially backed Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara, where Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front.

The bill states that France holds “legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused”.

It lists the “crimes of French colonisation”, including nuclear tests, extrajudicial killings, “physical and psychological torture”, and the “systematic plundering of resources”.

The bill states 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”.

However, Tebboune had said in a speech in December 2024 that Algiers was “not tempted by money, neither euros nor dollars”.

“We demand recognition of the crimes committed in the country” by France, he said. “I am not asking for financial compensation.”

Before taking office, French President Emmanuel Macron had acknowledged that his country’s colonisation of Algeria was a “crime against humanity”, but Paris has yet to offer Algiers a formal apology.

Algeria says the war with colonial France killed 1.5 million people. French historians put the death toll lower at 500,000, 400,000 of them Algerian.

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