Using and Abusing Memory Laws in Search of “Historical Truth’ : The Case of the 2018 Amendments to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance Act’

Współautorstwo: Gliszczyńska-Grabias, Aleksandra

The Right to Memory: History, Media, Law, and Ethics / ed. N. Tirosh and A. Reading, Berghahn Books, New York 2023, s.112-131.

Memory Laws in Poland and Hungary : Report by the research consortium ‘The Challenges of Populist Memory Politics and Militant Memory Laws (MEMOCRACY)’

Współautorstwo: Gliszczyńska-Grabias, Aleksandra; Wójcik, Anna; Sadowski, Mirosław Michał; Vorobiova, Anastasiia

Warszawa : Instytut Nauk Prawnych PAN, 2023

ISBN 9788366300767

Bibliografia - s. 55-75.

This Report consists of two main parts devoted to Poland’s and Hungary’s remembering of and dealing with the past, including with the use of memory laws and other deployments of legal and extra-legal means in historical policy, including soft law. It also discusses relevant domestic courts’ jurisprudence. The report situates these practices against European human rights law standards, inferred from the ECtHR case law. The aim of this exercise is capturing the dynamics of the Polish and Hungarian state’s relationship to the past after 1989 in a concise form and examine the current legal framework. The Polish and Hungarian sections are structured around common themes. In what follows, we shall discuss mnemonic constitutionalism, the institutionalisation of mnemonic governance, memorialisation of the Second World War and the Holocaust, reckoning with communism, education, and memory. The report includes discussions of political, social, and cultural factors that contextualise the legal framework. The final part concludes with broader reflections on the state of Polish and Hungarian memocracies, understood as constitutional and political regimes based on references to the past and a specific form of governance of historical memory. The report is supplemented by Conclusions and Recommendations addressed to a wide range of players and participants of public deliberations over history and the past, including lawmakers on domestic and European level, academia, and the civil society.

The authors are grateful to the Volkswagen Foundation for supporting this study within their research grant allocated for the consortium project ‘MEMOCRACY’ (2021-2024).

How long does the past endure? : ‘continuing violations’ and the ‘very distant past’ before the UN Human Rights Committee

Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 2023, t. 41, nr 2, s. 97-114.

The concept of ‘continuing violation’ allows reviewing applications concerning effects of violations that started before a treaty came into a force with regard to a state that allegedly committed the violation. This article analyses how the UN Human Rights Committee has recently approached two communications concerning continuing violations that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s (K.K. and Others v Russia; F.A.J. and B.M.R.A. v Spain). It critiques the fact that the Committee has introduced an additional qualification to its case law on continuing violations, namely that it has no jurisdiction over the violations with continuing effect, when underlying violations happened in the ‘very distant past’. The article argues that communications raising violations of the families of forcibly disappeared persons – at least these brought by their children – should not be ruled inadmissible because of time constraint since the disappearances. Lastly, the article reveals a tacit influence of the European Court of Human Rights on the Committee in the analysed case law.

Czy państwo może ograniczyć możliwość rozpatrywania wniosków azylowych : (ocena przepisów ustawy wywózkowej)

Poza prawem : prawna ocena działań państwa polskiego w reakcji na kryzys humanitarny na granicy polsko-białoruskiej / redakcja: Witold Klaus. Warszawa : Wydawnictwo INP PAN, 2022, s. 8-9.