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7. Military parade in Moscow dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the victory in the“ Great Patriotic War”, i. e. the east European theatre during World War II | Presidential Press and Information Office, Wikimedia Commons resolutions on the past adopted for the sake of“ good neighbourliness” and mutual recognition between the two regions of Europe to transcend this memory divide. The action of Eastern European members of the European Parliament( in particular those from the Baltic States) thus led a few years later to a memorial point of convergence regarding a dual recognition: that of the Nazi crimes perpetrated against the European Jewish populations and that of Soviet crimes committed against East European civilian populations. This convergence based on the premise of an equivalence of these crimes is recognised by several resolutions. In 2008, the European Parliament recognised the famine of 1932- 1933 in Ukraine artificially caused by the USSR as a“ crime against humanity”. Above all, the European resolution of 2009 establishes a European Day of Remembrance on 23 August recalling the German- Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939 that has become the inaugural and programmatic event of the double Nazi / Soviet crime committed against European civilians during the Second World War. This consensus reached based on an event presented as foundational to build a European collective memory is once again affirmed by the Resolution on the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe, approved by a large majority of MEPs on 19 September 2019( far right, right and centre-left). Some representatives of Western Europe( Spain and Italy in particular) then expressed their misgivings over equating Nazism and Stalinism, and historians and artists rallied together in Belgium to condemn this vision of history.
Alongside European policy on the past is making the contesting of various crimes punishable as criminal offences. By its Framework Decision 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law, the Council of Europe called on EU member states to“ take the necessary measures” to penalise“ publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes” defined by the International Criminal Court, which also criminalises the denial of the Armenian genocide.
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Observing Memories Issue 5