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4. International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Poland, January 2020 | Frankie Fouganthinmm, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
small scale. Memory laws passed by national parliaments in Europe are therefore part of a tradition of Roman civil law that is dominant in Europe, which favours legislative instruments to establish norms and thereby organise societies. Moreover, the tradition of free speech guaranteed by their constitution in English-speaking countries accounts for the absence of legislation condemning negationist discourse which, on the other hand, is present in most European countries that do not have this tradition.
Apart from these legacies, memory laws originate from three new contexts that arose at the same time in Europe in the late 20th century.
First, the anamnesis in Western Europe of the genocide of the Jews as a unique crime to which no statutory limitations apply. This crime became a focal point of the Western-European historical narrative of the 1990s, developed in the name of human rights and the defence of minorities. For the purposes of European identity, this prime focus of memory brought members of Parliament in several countries to legislate on the qualification of genocide by criminalising any denial. The Armenian genocide witnessed a similar course, having been recognised by law in many countries. Negationist discourse was subsequently criminalised in Greece, Croatia, Slovakia and Switzerland. However, in France, in 2012 and then in 2017, the Constitutional Court dismissed the motion each time for violating freedom of speech. This
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