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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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