CY CASE: Imprescriptibility as an Ontological Category: What the Paul Touvier Litigation Did to French Criminal Law
Introduction Prescription is, in continental criminal law, one of those quiet institutions that everyone accepts without quite knowing why. Time passes, evidence decays, social peace reasserts itself, and the State renounces its right to punish. The 1808 Code d'instruction criminelle fixed the limitation period at twenty years for crimes; the 1958 Code de procédure pénale reproduced the rule almost unchanged. For more than a century and a half, French doctrine treated this temporal extinction as a near-natural feature of criminal repression, to the point that Faustin Hélie could write that prescription belonged to "the necessary order of things". The Paul Touvier litigation, conducted between 1973 and 1995, broke that quiet consensus. It did so not by abolishing prescription but by forcing French courts to articulate, for the first time in operative terms, what it means for a crime to lie outside the order of time altogether. This article argues that the doctrinal produc...