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