The National Assembly\u2019s vote to repeal the Code Noir reminds us that some texts outlive their own era. But the issue is not only memorial: in migration policies, Libyan detention systems and Sahelian repression, law still organizes hierarchies between protected lives, monitored lives and exposed lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On May 28, 2026, the French National Assembly adopted a bill repealing the Code Noir, the colonial text that organized slavery in the French colonies. The act carries heavy symbolic weight. It comes twenty-five years after the 2001 Taubira law, which recognized the transatlantic slave trade and slavery as a crime against humanity. It also recalls an embarrassing fact: a state can materially abolish an institution, morally condemn its legacy, and still leave within its legal order the formal trace of its former violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Caution is necessary: the National Assembly\u2019s adoption of the text must not be presented as final promulgation as long as the parliamentary procedure is not completed. But that reservation does not reduce the significance of the gesture. It clarifies it. The issue is not whether the Code Noir still produced ordinary judicial effects. It did not. The colder question is this: what does a republic do when it discovers that the archive of its domination still exists as a legal form? And what does it say about itself when it needs a new law to remove a slave-law text from legal memory?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here, law is not merely technical material. It is organized memory. Old texts do not always govern, but they testify. They testify to what the state accepted, what it regulated, what at one point it considered normal, useful or necessary. Repealing such a text does not erase the crime, compensate the victims or repair the present by itself. But it ends a form of legal indifference. In a state governed by law, forms matter. They say who deserves repair, even symbolic repair, and who is still asked to wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same relationship between law, memory and power reappears in the French debate over the Franco-Algerian agreement of December 27, 1968. On October 30, 2025, the National Assembly adopted a resolution aiming to denounce these agreements. The text is politically strong but legally limited: a parliamentary resolution is not the effective denunciation of an international agreement. It marks a position. It applies pressure. It does not replace a diplomatic procedure or a full analysis of bilateral obligations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 1968 agreement organizes the conditions of movement, residence and work for Algerian nationals in France and their families. It was born in a precise history: decolonization, postcolonial circulation, France\u2019s need for labor, the Franco-Algerian bilateral relationship, and the impossible clean separation between a defeated empire and persisting dependencies. Reducing it to a mere migration advantage is, according to several lawyers and associations, more a political instrumentalization than a serious legal debate. Presenting it as untouchable would be equally weak. An agreement can be discussed, renegotiated and modernized. But it must be treated as a legal text, not as a trophy offered to electoral impulses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is where the mechanism becomes dangerous. When the migration debate hardens, the 1968 agreement becomes a convenient substitute. It allows a general anxiety about immigration to be displaced onto Algerians. It also allows legal complexity to be presented as a scandalous obstacle to state authority. Procedure then becomes suspicious. A guarantee becomes a privilege. A bilateral convention becomes an anomaly. This is a way of governing through designation: a text, a group and a memory are selected, then a theater of firmness is built around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
International law does not forbid the revision of an agreement. It requires forms. That is precisely what rupture rhetoric cannot tolerate. Form slows things down. Form requires qualification. Form distinguishes denunciation, revision, suspension and negotiation. In a political space saturated by urgency and escalation, such precision is treated as weakness. It is, however, the minimum of the rule of law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Libyan file makes this logic more brutally visible. In February 2026, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Support Mission in Libya published a report on violations suffered by migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in Libya. The reported facts are extremely serious: arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, forced labor, extortion and inhuman treatment, in an environment where trafficking networks, armed groups, nominal authorities and criminal actors intersect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here, one must write with caution, not softness. Violations must be attributed to the reports that document them. Individual criminal responsibility requires procedures. But the general political mechanism is known: Libya has become a buffer zone for Euro-Mediterranean migration policy. Departures are prevented there, interceptions at sea are encouraged, and returns expose people to serious risks. This is not a peripheral accident. It is an architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That architecture allows European states to move violence outside their direct field of vision. The border does not disappear: it doubles itself. It is placed at sea, in detention centers, in technical agreements, in coast guard training and in cooperation budgets. European law proclaims asylum, dignity and protection against inhuman treatment. Externalized practice produces another grammar: prevent arrival, contain bodies, subcontract the dirty work, then periodically express outrage at the consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Again, law is not absent. It is everywhere. It is in agreements, protocols, funding, administrative categories, return procedures and zones of responsibility. The problem is its dissociated use. One law to proclaim human value. Another to organize removal. A third to make responsibility hard to grasp. This fragmentation produces functional impunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Burkina Faso, Human Rights Watch, FIDH, OMCT and Observatoire KISAL denounced in April 2026 an intensification of repression against civil society by the military government. FIDH notably reported the announcement, on April 15, 2026, of the dissolution of 118 civil society organizations by the ministry in charge of territorial administration. The authorities invoked legislation on freedom of association; human rights organizations see it as a hardening against spaces of monitoring, documentation and criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The country faces a real, deep and deadly security crisis. But the existence of an armed threat does not mechanically suspend public liberties. It makes their guarantee even more necessary, because the state of exception always tends to expand. Security reasoning follows a known slope. First, it targets the armed enemy. Then those who doubt the strategy. Then those who document abuses. Finally those who demand accountability. At each stage, the same justification returns: the state must not be weakened during war. But a state that equates criticism with treason does not become stronger. It becomes less controllable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chad offers another version of this closure. The violence linked to the demonstrations of October 20, 2022 remains a rupture point. Human rights organizations have denounced the absence of effective accountability. In its 2025 World Report, Human Rights Watch still noted that no responsibility had been established for the violent repression of those demonstrations in several cities, and that an amnesty law had removed the possibility of prosecutions for abuses linked to those events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An amnesty can be presented as a tool of political appeasement. It can also become a lock against justice, especially when it covers serious acts committed in a context of repression. The UN Human Rights Committee has also been seized of concerns over the effects of such an amnesty on victims\u2019 access to justice. Law is then turned against its function. It no longer serves to establish facts, identify responsibilities, protect victims and limit arbitrariness. It serves to close the file. This is the clearest form of institutional impunity: not the absence of law, but a law that organizes judicial forgetting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Code Noir, the 1968 agreement, migrants in Libya, civil society in Burkina Faso, repression in Chad: these files are not identical. Confusing them would be a mistake. But reading them separately to the point of making them incomparable would be another. Each shows one facet of the same problem: law does not protect in the abstract. It protects when a power relation forces it to protect. It excludes when a power relation authorizes it to exclude. It repairs when memory becomes politically impossible to postpone. It neutralizes when security or sovereignty are invoked to close discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lesson is severe. A republic can repeal a colonial text and maintain a migration policy obsessed with sorting. States can sign conventions and externalize practices that expose migrants to violence. Regimes can invoke national survival to reduce public liberties. Assemblies can vote spectacular resolutions without direct legal effect. In all these cases, the decisive question remains the same: who can oppose law to power?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is where the rule of law is measured. Not in commemorations alone. Not in solemn declarations. Not in texts brandished to humiliate an adversary. It is measured in the ability of a detained migrant, an injured protester, a threatened human rights defender, a descendant of colonial victims or a foreigner subject to a bilateral agreement to be recognized as a subject of rights, not as a variable of public order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The repeal of the Code Noir can be a just act. But it is not enough. A legal memory that does not look at contemporary borders remains incomplete. Justice begins when the state agrees to remove old texts of domination. It becomes serious when it stops producing new ones under other names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yamina Boudiaf<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The National Assembly\u2019s vote to repeal the Code Noir reminds us that some texts outlive their own era. But the issue is not only memorial: in migration policies, Libyan detention systems and Sahelian repression, law still organizes hierarchies between protected lives, monitored lives and exposed lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[1533],"tags":[5231,2878,3784,3484,5234,2863,3097,3934,5237,3058,5240,5243,5246,5249,3211,4460],"class_list":["post-6451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rights-and-justice","tag-1968-franco-algerian-agreement-en","tag-algeria-en","tag-burkina-faso-en","tag-chad-en","tag-code-noir-en","tag-colonial-memory-en","tag-france-fr-en","tag-human-rights-en","tag-international-justice-en","tag-libya-en","tag-migrants-in-libya-en","tag-migration-en","tag-public-liberties-en","tag-repression-en","tag-rights-and-justice-en","tag-sahel-en","signatures_editoriales-yamina-boudiaf-en"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-150x150.png","medium":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-300x169.png","medium_large":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-768x432.png","large":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-1024x576.png","1536x1536":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-1536x864.png","2048x2048":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf.png","colormag-highlighted-post":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-392x272.png","colormag-featured-post-medium":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-390x205.png","colormag-featured-post-small":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-130x90.png","colormag-featured-image":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-800x445.png","colormag-default-news":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-150x150.png","colormag-featured-image-large":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_loi_memoire_frontieres_yamina_boudiaf-1400x600.png"},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/5e13110bacd4f847feb05cd12abf95409c8b84b76453c8634a84f5f016d31853?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":"0","magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"The National Assembly\u2019s vote to repeal the Code Noir reminds us that some texts outlive their own era. 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