Imprescriptible is that which does not prescribe.
In order to know the meaning of the imprescriptible term that concerns us now, we are going to proceed, first of all, to know its etymological origin. In this case, we have to explain that it is a word that derives from Latin. Exactly it is the result of the sum of two lexical components of said language:
-The prefix “in-”, which, in this case, means “no”.
-The noun “praescriptio”. This is formed with the prefix “prae-”, which is synonymous with “in front”; the word “scriptus”, which means “written”, and the suffix “-tio”, which is used to indicate action and effect.
Concept of imprescriptibility
The adjective imprescriptible refers to what 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, 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 become extinct beyond the years.
This means that, in the event of an imprescriptible event, the right to exercise an action is never lost. Therefore, an imprescriptible crime can be tried even if a long time has passed.
Crimes against humanity are imprescriptible.
Crimes against humanity and war
Crimes against humanity and war crimes , for example, are imprescriptible. In this way, criminals can be pursued and judged even if decades have passed since their crime .
For all the above, we can state that the crimes of torture and crimes carried out by the Nazi regime in Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler, are imprescriptible. And that means that 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, are also true.
This circumstance means that said crimes may not have been tried at the time, but they may be tried 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 taken to court for cases such as the torture carried out in the well-known Villa Grimaldi.
In criminal law , prescription can generate the extinction 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 framework, 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 fugitive genocidaire is found. As he is responsible for an imprescriptible crime, this subject can be tried and convicted for his crimes.