ALGIERS: Algeria’s Senate on Thursday demanded changes to a law criminalizing 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 colonization 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 finalizing 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 colonization,” 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 colonization 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 colonization 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.
Algeria Senate demands changes to law criminalizing French rule
https://arab.news/w4en7
Algeria Senate demands changes to law criminalizing French rule
- The Senate said Thursday some articles of the text did not fully reflect the official approach set out by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune
- France has called the bill “clearly hostile”
German prosecutors seize assets in Lebanon bank fraud probe
- They allege that Salameh, acting with his brother Raja, “embezzled funds totalling more than $330 million”
- The money was laundered through a shell company in the British Virgin Islands
BERLIN: German prosecutors said Thursday they had seized assets worth around 35 million euros ($42 million) as part of a money-laundering probe targeting Lebanon’s former central bank governor Riad Salameh and four other people.
Salameh headed Lebanon’s central bank between 1993 and 2023 and has faced numerous accusations including embezzlement, money laundering and tax evasion in separate probes in Lebanon and abroad.
He has denied any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors in Munich said in a statement that “high-value commercial properties in Munich and Hamburg, as well as shares in a real estate company in Duesseldorf” had been seized as part of their investigation.
They allege that Salameh, acting with his brother Raja, “embezzled funds totalling more than $330 million to the detriment of the Lebanese central bank and thereby at the expense of the Lebanese state, in order to illegally enrich himself” between 2004 and 2015.
The funds originated from financial transactions between the Lebanese central bank and commercial banks in Lebanon.
The money was laundered through a shell company in the British Virgin Islands and used by Raja Salameh and three other co-accused for investments in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, prosecutors say.
A court in Munich will now decide whether the seized property can be permanently confiscated.
German prosecutors opened their investigation in 2021 and have been working with investigators from France and Luxembourg.
Salameh has been accused of being a key culprit in Lebanon’s economic crash, which the World Bank has called one of the worst in recent history, but he has defended his legacy and insisted he is a “scapegoat.”
He was arrested in Lebanon in 2024 and indicted in April 2025 for allegedly embezzling $44 million from the central bank.
In September he was freed after posting more than $14 million in bail and on condition of a one-year travel ban.
