What is imprescriptible?

What Does imprescriptible Mean

In order to know the meaning of the imprescriptible term that concerns us now, we are going to proceed, first, to know its etymological origin. In this case, we have to state that it is a word that derives from Latin. It is exactly the result of the sum of two lexical components of that language:

-The prefix “in-”, which, in this case, means “no”.

-The noun “praescriptio”. This is formed with the prefix "prae-", which is synonymous with "ahead"; the word "scriptus", which means "written", and the suffix "-tio", which is used to indicate action and effect.

The adjective imprescriptible refers to what it does not prescribe . The verb prescribe , in turn, is used in the field of law to refer to the extinction of a right, an obligation or a responsibility due to the passage of time .
As a legal institute, the prescription generates an effect of consolidation of a factual situation , allowing the acquisition of a foreign thing or the extinction of a right . When something is imprescriptible, on the other hand, it does not extinguish beyond the years.

This means that, in the face of an imprescriptible fact, the right to exercise an action is never lost . Therefore, an imprescriptible crime can be tried even if a long time has elapsed.
The crimes against humanity and war crimes , for example, are imprescriptible. In this way, criminals can be prosecuted and tried even after decades of their crime have passed .
For all the above, we can state that the crimes of torture and crimes carried out by the Nazi regime in Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, are imprescriptible. And that means that so are, therefore, all those atrocities committed by the fascist dictatorship carried out in Italy by Benito Mussolini as well as those developed during certain dictatorships in Latin American countries, for example.
This circumstance means that these crimes could not be tried at the time, but they could be later. A good example of this is, for example, that Augusto Pinochet (1915 - 2006), who was dictator of Chile during the period between 1973 and 1990, had to face judicially decades later the atrocities carried out during said regime. Thus, he was brought to court for cases such as the torture carried out in the well-known Villa Grimaldi.
In criminal law , the statute of limitations can lead to the termination of the action or the penalty. That does not happen with genocide , to cite one case, since it is a crime against humanity. Suppose that a dictator who takes control of his country after a coup d'état promotes a plan to exterminate all members of an ethnic group. In this context, his government kidnaps and murders thousands of people. When this individual loses power, he leaves the nation in an unknown direction. Twenty years later, the genocidal fugitive is found. As he is responsible for an imprescriptible crime, this subject can be prosecuted and convicted for his crimes.

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