Attentat

Origin

From either French attentat or German Attentat.

Full definition of attentat

Noun

1. (legal, obsolete) Anything whatsoever, as a ruling, by the judge of a lower court in a matter pending an appeal.
• 1842, Richard Burn, The Ecclesiastical Law, Volume 4, 9th Edition, page 217,All the several acts of one court day constitute, with reference to attentats, but one act, notwithstanding an appeal intermediate between those acts (h).
• 1848, Archibald John Stephens, A Practical Treatise of the Laws Relating to the Clergy, Volume 1, page 33,An attentat, in the language of the civil and canon laws, is anything, whatsoever, wrongfully innovated or attempted in the suit by the judge à quo, pending an appeal....In Chichester v. Donegal (3) it was intimated by Sir John Nicholl that “The regular course for procuring the revocation of attentats was by a separate proceeding, civil or criminal, as against a judge à quo, and that it was not by charging the supposed attentats, accumulatively, in a mere ordinary libel of appeal.”
2. (legal, obsolete) Any step wrongly innovated or attempted by an inferior judge in a suit.
3. (obsolete) An attempted assault or assassination of a political figure; a politically motivated attempted assault.
• 1920, Lassa Oppenheim, Ronald Roxburgh (editor), International Law: A Treatise, Volume 1: Peace, page 516,The first attempt was the enactment of the Belgian so-called attentat clause by Belgium in 1856, following the case of Jacquin ² in 1854. A French manufaturer named Jules Jacquin, domiciled in Belgium, and a foreman of his factory named Célestin Jacquin, who was also a Frenchman, tried to cause an explosion on the railway line between Lille and Calais with the intention of murdering the Emperor Napolen III. France requested the extradition of the two criminals, but the Belgian Court of Appeal had to refuse the surrender on account of the Belgian extradition law interdicting the surrender of political prisoners.
• 2004, U. N. Gupta, The Human Rights: Conventions And Indian Law, page 146,By the end of nineteenth century the attentat clause became a general exception in making of extradition treaties. The 1933 Montevideo Convention on Extradition by its Article 5 incorporated the exception in nature of attentat clause in the general protection against extradition, already made available to the political offenders under Article 3(2).----