[Depuis le 23 mars, la chambre de l’instruction de la cour d’appel de Paris examine les demandes d’extradition envoyées par l’Etat italien à l’encontre de dix anciens militants d’extrême gauche italiens. Ces derniers, poursuivis ou condamnés dans le cadre de procès des années de plomb, se sont réfugiés dans les années 1980-1990 en France, où ils ont été accueillis au nom de la « doctrine Mitterrand » (1985) qui prévoyait d’accorder l’asile politique aux militants ayant accepté d’abandonner la lutte armée. Malgré les demandes d’extradition, pendant plus de trente ans et jusqu’à aujourd’hui, la France n’a pratiquement jamais dérogé à cette règle. Après une nouvelle demande d’extradition de l’Italie, Emmanuel Macron a ordonné l’arrestation le 28 avril 2021, de dix d’entre eux.]
Grandstand. Imagine time stopping. We would all be frozen, motionless, with our errors, our faults, and our life would hang around our necks like a necklace of lava. That can not be. Time passes. Life becomes something else, the current carries us away, our opinions fade away, our affections vary, we are both the same and someone else. And our present life recovers the past, redeems it, saves us. Therefore, there can be no secular law without prescription.
Time, oblivion, offers the right a concrete, reasonable, and also human limit. The hierarchy of penalties, of sanctions, does not rise to heaven, it is interrupted somewhere, it is not absolute, but relative. The law is addressed to man, it relates to human life, and only to it. There could be no perpetual punishment unless life were eternal. It is clear that the absence of prescription is to be placed on the side of eternity, permanence, a justice transcendent to man, a religious conception of law. But men change, times change, justifications, ideas change. Except for crimes against humanity, justice must one day forget.
“An egalitarian society considers that everyone is fallible, that error is of this world, and therefore it rehabilitates, it forgets, it welcomes”
The French Revolution discarded perpetuity and instituted prescription. This marks its democratic origin. The individual is too fragile in the face of the state; the length of the sentence, or its application, cannot be perpetual. You can’t keep someone out of social life forever. A society is defined by its law. An unjust society, a feudal regime marks with a hot iron. An egalitarian society considers that everyone is fallible, that error is of this world, and consequently it rehabilitates, it forgets, it welcomes.
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