of Parliament ), which first and foremost deal with commemorations . The second group comprises laws that prescribe relatively binding measures for States or their citizens such as compensation for victims and their families , the rehabilitation of political prisoners , the establishment of commemorations , the introduction of historical events in school education , etc . The third group corresponds to the laws that prohibit and impose criminal sanctions on certain statements in the public space vis-àvis historical events : the denial of the Jewish and Armenian genocides , the denial of communist crimes or , conversely , as with the Russian law of 2014 , the rendering of Soviet crimes committed during the Second World War . It is chiefly the expansion of these memory laws of a punitive nature that lends European laws their distinctiveness : most European countries ( 28 out of 47 ) have adopted provisions that impose sanctions on statements about the past , mainly the denial of the Jewish and Armenian genocides . In the case of the Jewish genocide , the 22 countries that have criminalised negationism are mostly European .
The last two groups of these laws have a normative character because they entail various rights and obligations for States and citizens . Declaratory laws , on the other hand , do not change citizens ’ legal status . However , from the point of view of representations of the past , these declaratory laws can be considered to generate norms .
To appreciate the uniqueness of these memory laws adopted in Europe , the legal traditions from which they originate as well as the contexts in which they were developed should be understood .
Over the long term , the proliferation of memory laws adopted in Europe in the late 20th century marks a difference in legal traditions specific to States , historically divided between civil law and common law . The common law tradition , which characterises the United Kingdom and the countries of its former colonies on different continents such as the United States , favours judicial decisions to establish the norm and regulate social relations . These countries are not familiar with the phenomenon of memory laws , or only on a very
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3 . Street sign in Seville showing the name change and clarifying that the old name has been eliminated in application of the Historical Memory Law | Kespito , CC BY-SA 3.0 , Wikimedia Commons
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Observing Memories Issue 5