Professor Angelika Nussberger - The importance of memory: how to deal with a difficult past

Hanna Arendt warned that the fragile truth of historical facts was vulnerable not only to being forgotten but also to manipulation (Arendt, Human Condition, Chicago University Press 1958, p. 232). However, Hanna Arendt could not have foreseen the proliferation of ‘memory laws’ in so many countries in the 21st century. Memory laws represent an attempt by governments to foster or promote selected narratives about the past, frequently being those which reflect only positive views of a particular country’s past and overlook any negative aspects of that past. In some cases, governments will prohibit the expression of unfavourable or negative views about the country’s past and will subject individuals expressing such views to criminal prosecution and imprisonment.

In her lecture Professor Angelika Nussberger told us about the work of “MEMOCRACY”, a European research project led by her involving collaboration between members of Cologne University, T.M.C. Asser Institute (Amsterdam), Copenhagen University and the Polish Academy of Sciences. The project is looking at memory laws in Germany and several countries in central and eastern Europe, including Ukraine and Russia, and the problems that these can give rise to for human rights and the rule of law when a state’s legislation promotes or directs a distorted or one-sided view of history.

Professor Nussberger explained how vitally important it is for every country to look critically and openly at its past and to face up to the negative features of that past and will highlight the dangers for the health of a society when remembrance of those negative features is suppressed. In addressing these issues, Professor Nussberger considered the way in which remembrance of the past has been and is being regulated in a number of countries, with particular regard to Russia and Germany.

Angelika Nussberger is Professor of International, Constitutional Law and Comparative Law at the University of Cologne, Director of the Academy for the European Protection of Human Rights and Vice-President of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. From 2011 to 2019, she was a judge of the European Court of Human Rights and from 2017 to 2019 its Vice-President. In addition, she is a member of the Advisory Board of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the Council of Europe’s “Venice Commission”) and the Institut de droit international.

Angelika Nussberger graduated from the University of Munich in both Slavic languages and literature (1987) and law (1989) and was awarded her doctorate in law by the University of Würzburg in 1993 for a dissertation on the establishment of a preliminary form of constitutional justice in the last years of the Soviet Union. From 1993- 2001 she was a research fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Foreign and International Social Law in Munich and from 1994 -1995 a visiting researcher at Harvard University. From 2001 to 2002, she worked as a legal adviser at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.