Amnesties
No one was brought to justice for crimes committed during the war, not even for the case of Maurice Audin, a young communist student arrested and tortured to death. The case had been specifically documented at the time by the "Comité Audin", to which historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet belonged.
The first amnesty was imposed in 1962 by President Charles de Gaulle, by decree, preempting a parliamentary discussion that might have denied immunity to men like General Paul Aussaresses, Massu's right-hand man.
The second amnesty was enacted in 1968 by the National Assembly, which gave blanket amnesty to all acts committed during the Algerian war.
The OAS members were given amnesty by president François Mitterrand (PS), and a general amnesty for all war crimes was declared in 1982. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, among others, has qualified it as a "shame".
The archives of the war were closed to the public for thirty years, a period extendable for up to 60 years for those documents that were liable to compromise a person's privacy or state security. It was only in 1995-96 that new works began to reveal information.
Read more about this topic: Torture During The Algerian War