Can Law Save Memory? Rethinking the Role of Legal Measures in Collective Denial, Forgetting and Remembrance

Absztrakt

This article tries to address the controversy around the progression of legal measures of national and supranational nature that aim to introduce norms of desired social conduct in relation to past events. For the last two decades we have been observers of an intensified and complicated dialogue between law and memory. This dialogue in several countries resulted in the introduction of measures intended to combat acts of revisionism, including the negation of crimes against humanity, in particular of the Holocaust, laws on the recognition of genocide, guidelines on the interpretation of slavery and colonialism, as well as in the establishment of days of remembrance. It has provoked a debate on the role that law should play in defining history and in shaping the narrative of collective memory. To whom does the history belong? What is the responsibility of a historian and of a legislator to people and communities? Are legal measures that impose what needs to be remembered and in what way justifiable as reflections of values and norms of contemporary societies, or rather, by framing the past so that it responds to collective expectations of the present, they dangerously become measures of the same order as the behaviour they try to address?