Les institutions de clémence en Europe : Amnistie, Grâce et Prescription en droit international et comparé

[Autom. eng. transl.] The rules governing leniency of the state, and in particular amnesty, prescription and pardon, affect the most intimate of legal systems, since they concern the way in which a social body decides to settle certain accounts with its past, whether it be through forgiveness and / or forgetting. However, these rules seem to be experiencing a crisis of identity. Conceived as a tool of the right to govern time, amnesty, prescription and grace seem, more and more, governed by the latter. Originally imagined as a bargaining chip in the context of transition processes, they seem to be challenged by the same judicial power they wanted to shelter. Determining whether states are now limited in the exercise of their own leniency was the starting point for this research, which is structured around two main thrusts, the first of which focuses on international law and the second on law. constitutional comparison (at the European level). Studies of international law and constitutional law have been supplemented by summary analyzes and commentaries by experts in other fields, such as sociologists, philosophers, criminologists, historians, and so on. The entanglement of these different perspectives has proved very fruitful. While it is true that international law is in the process of establishing borders around the exercise of leniency by States, it is not wrong that these limits relate mainly to specific cases of inviolability, and that the gray areas remain vast and many. To be able to turn the page, one must have read it, wrote, in 1997, the Rapporteur on the question of impunity by the Sub-Commission on Human Rights. The purpose of this work is to understand how states have read and read this page.