Algeria’s parliament unanimously approved a law on Wednesday declaring France’s colonization of the country a crime and demanded an apology and reparations, the Guardian reported. 

Lawmakers, standing in the chamber wearing scarves in the colors of the national flag, chanted “long live Algeria” as they applauded the passage of the bill, which states that France holds “legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused”.

The legislation lists the “crimes of French colonization”, which include nuclear tests, extrajudicial killings, “physical and psychological torture” and the “systematic plundering of resources”.

It states that “full and fair compensation for all material and moral damages caused by French colonization is an inalienable right of the Algerian state and people”.

France’s rule over Algeria from 1830 until 1962 was a period marked by mass killings and large-scale deportations, all the way up to the bloody war of independence from 1954 to 1962.

Algeria says the war killed 1.5 million people, while French historians put the death toll at 500,000 in total, 400,000 of them Algerian.