The weakening of the statute of limitations in French criminal law

Abstract

After having been thoroughly reformed by Law n°2017-242 of 27 February 2017 and then revisited by Laws n°2018-703 of 3 August 2018 and n°2021-478 of 21 April 2021, French law relating to the statute of limitations testifies, more than ever, to a hostility towards the very idea of an extinction of the right to act in order to punish offenders. The present study intends to highlight the two vectors by which such hos-tility is manifested: first, the paralysis of public action which allows the process of crim-inal punishment to be initiated is weakened to the point of being fictitious; second, the statute of limitations on the sentence finally pronounced is governed by rules which are intended to sanction only serious deficiencies on the part of the enforcement authority.