The Human Rights Institute analyses the novelties of the Democratic Memory Act

According to Cristina García Pascual, director of the conference and full professor of Philosophy of Law, “the interest at organising the conferences was twofold: on the one hand, our aim is to analyse and discuss the novelties that the draft for the Democratic Memory Act introduces with regard to the 2007 Historic Memory Act. Novelties such as the nullity of Franco’s trials, the establishment of the State’s responsibility in the exhumation of graves, the introduction of the gender perspective in the memory’s recovery, the establishment of a regime of administrative penalties, or the prohibition of foundations exalting Francoism… On the other hand, we want to show students how the debate about Spain’s past is part of a wider debate in relation to memory that is taking place in most European countries and beyond”.

Similar to Nazi extermination camps, Stalinist purges or the closer in time massacres of the Balkan war, Professor García Pascual points out, “the crimes of the civil war and of the Franco regime have not ceased to challenge us morally while still put into question some of our most stable legal and political categories. When facing these facts, we see positions and discourses that we have already seen and heard in our country. In Germany and the countries of the former Yugoslavia, they deal with the past too, which sometimes presents itself as a challenge and often as an obsession”.

In this respect, Professor García Pascual recalls that “in certain democratic societies, processes of ethical-political self-compression of one’s past are encouraged and individual and collective responsibilities are claimed. But at the same time, as in Spain, in some of these countries voices are raised with greater or lesser success not to go over old grounds, seeing every demand for legal responsibility as a form of revenge, and above all, as a possibility of reactivating violence. In the end, as we all know, in many societies damaged by processes of mob violence, the ideal of oblivion as the best way to overcome the past constitutes a great temptation. Nevertheless, to do nothing, denying the memory, the judicial protection or the political action, to not respond to unprecedented violence, would imply succumbing to it. Reverting the situation or refusing to idleness is a costly process, a multi-disciplinary business to which many countries have got involved”. In this sense, she notes “taking a look at Europe, get to know the experience of other societies and certainly paying attention to the mandates of international law might be extremely enlightening”.

The conference will be attended by the historian Julián Casanova, who will speak about his last book, Una violència Indómita. El siglo XX europeo; by Professor Massimo de la Torre, who will talk about the German public presocutor Frizt Bauer, one of the greatest exponents in the fight against the impunity of Nazism crimes; Professor Josep Tamarit, specialist in transitional justice who will address the issue of memory and truth; and finally, it will also count on the intervention of Fabian Salvioli, the UN Special Rapporteur, on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantee of non-repetition. The conference will be closed by Rosa Peréz Garijo, Councillor for Participation, Transparency, Cooperation and Democratic Quality and by Javier Palao, Principal of the Faculty of Law of the Universitat de València.

The conference, which can be followed online with required registration, is being held within the framework of Project GV Prometeo 2018/156 International and European Security: from the prevention of armed conflict to strategies for the construction of an inclusive and plural citizenship and Project: DER2016-78356-P Transformations in Justice. Autonomy, inequality and the exercise of rights.