Observing Memories Issue 5 - December 2021 | Page 40

recognition of genocide or the criminalisation of negationism by law constituted an instrument for European integration for countries wishing to join the EU . Poland , for example , then a candidate , was the first Central European country to pass a law in 1998 that criminalises Holocaust denial ( Article 55 ). Conversely , the Turkish Parliament ’ s passing of a decision in its bylaws in July 2017 that prohibits and imposes criminal sanctions on “ insulting the history and the common past of the Turkish Nation ” – which implicitly targets the Armenian genocide – reveals , among other facts , Turkey ’ s desertion of the EU integration project since the 2010s .
The second context in the 1990s is the liberation of Eastern Europe countries from the former USSR that led to the law ’ s criminalisation of their communist past in a process of transitional justice . In this period of democratisation and decommunisation , the adoption of memory laws by Eastern Europe ’ s parliaments constituted an act of democratic sovereignty , breaking with the previous political regime . In some countries , this break was soon accompanied by the desire of members of parliament to go so far as to class this past as a criminal offence ( see for example the Czech Republic ’ s Law of April 1990 or Russia ’ s Law of April 1991 classing Stalin ’ s deportations of peoples as “ acts of genocide ”).
Meanwhile , the postcolonial issue finally arose in the societies of the former European empires ( France , Belgium and Germany ) with legislative provisions made pertaining to the recognition of crimes and reparations for victims and their descendants . European institutions encouraged this reparations policy . Thus , the European Parliament Resolution of 26 March 2019 called on Member States to initiate reparations in the form of public apologies to people of African descent living in Europe and victims of injustice and crimes against humanity , to restitute artefacts stolen during the colonial period to their countries of origin , and to declassify their colonial archives .
Besides these three synchronous contexts , it is noted that memory laws bear witness to a new model of conflict resolution and political violence .
Despite the new legal categorisations ( crimes against humanity and genocide ) adopted in the aftermath of the Second World War , the policy of forgetting – and its legal corollary , amnesty – was the political model of resolution advocated by nation states until the 1980s . The emergence of memory laws pointed to a reversal of this model , at around the same time . The end of conflict or oppression was accompanied by a judicialisation and a memorialisation of the past classed as criminal , which the legal framework guarantees in the eyes of members of parliament and societies .
This new model was also enforced in countries that had handled their transition to democracy in a traditional manner . The case of Spain is a fine example of this turnaround . While the Law of 1977 , promulgated following the end of the Franco dictatorship , was founded on a model of resolution that espoused forgetting and amnesty , twenty years later , it was condemned as a political act that denied the crimes and violated the victims of the Spanish Civil War and their descendants . The outcome of the social movement related to the “ recovery of historical memory ”, the 2007 law related to the new method of pronouncing judicial decisions on violent pasts , affording attention to the recognition of and reparations for victims of political violence .
For the European countries which , in the late 20th century , were unacquainted with or had no experience of a transition to democracy or the end of war , legislative provisions were put in place according to the same memory paradigm : categorising certain pasts as criminal offences gave rise to recognition and reparations owed to victims of crimes .
The criminalisation of the past that would thus characterise European memory laws was accompanied by overturning the notion of disturbing public order . The order to forget the violence of the past traditionally led to a public absence , even a prohibition , of the memorialisation of crimes and victims , perceived as a threat to peace and public order and , by extension , to the continuation of the community . On the contrary , memory laws guarantee the public disclosure of crimes committed
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Observing Memories Issue 5