Memory Laws in Poland and Hungary: Policy Brief

The study consists of two primary sections devoted to Poland’s and Hungary’s remembering of and dealing with the past – including with the deployment of memory laws and of other legal and extra-legal instruments in historical policy; also including soft law and relevant domestic courts’ jurisprudence. The report situates these practices against European human rights law standards as inferred from the European Court of Human Rights’ (hereinafter ‘ECtHR’) case law. The aim of this exercise is to capture the dynamics of the Polish and Hungarian states’ relationship to the past after 1989 in a concise form, and to examine their current legal frameworks. This policy brief will:

1) outline the general technicalities regarding the legal governance of history and memory in the CEE region, in particular Poland and Hungary;
2) explain the particularities of mnemonic constitutionalism; the institutionalisation of mnemonic governance; memorialisation of the WWII and the Holocaust; and the reckoning with communism, education, and memory; in both Hungary and Poland;
3) summarize the findings of the reports.

The policy brief concludes with recommendations for both states.