PRESS

Algeria will continue to demand archives held by France

ALGIERS- Abdelmadjid Chikhi, advisor to the President of the Republic, in charge of national archives and national memory national, reaffirmed Friday that Algeria "will not give up its request for recovering its archives held by France".

In a statement to APS, on the eve of the celebration of the 58th anniversary of Independence Day, Chikhi said that "the current and the rising generations will continue to demand the recovery of all the archives held by France and relating to several periods in our history," adding that "there is no real willingness from the French side to close this file definitively".

According to him, the French officials in charge of negotiations on this file have no decision-making power about this matter.

Recalling that all international laws and legislations clearly stipulate that "the archives belong to the territory in which they were produced", the head of the National Archives said that "France is trying to break these international laws."

In 2006, France promulgated a law that states that "archives are part of the public domain" and that they are, therefore, "inalienable and imprescriptible," said Chikhi.

Chikhi has been recently appointed advisor to the president of the Republic in charge of national archives and national memory.
He also cited the decision to disperse Algerian archives held by France in other centers "without the knowledge of Algeria".

For him, this move constitutes "a violation to the principle of non-retroactivity of laws", all the more since the archives file "is the subject" of talks and has not been definitively settled."

Since the dismissal of the director of the French archives, these talks "have been suspended for three years," he said
The Great Algerian-French Joint Commission may meet this month and will have inter alia files to be examined, that of the recovery of the national archives, he announced.