A/HRC/25/49 24. Positive initiatives exist, however, such as Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970, or President Nelson Mandela visiting the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria – often seen as embodying the policy of apartheid – in 2002. Integrated into a broader political strategy, memorialization can help to transform political realities, catalysing needed social debate on past crimes or events. III. A normative framework: the emergence of memorialization standards 25. The increasing trend in memorialization became institutionalized between 1997 and 2005, involving many actors in different forums and propelling States exiting conflicts or periods of repression to engage in active memorial policies, using increasingly similar modalities. Western memorial models commemorating the victims of Nazism, while not always the most adequate or appropriate, have become a template or at least a political and aesthetic inspiration for the representation of past tragedies or mass crimes. 26. Alongside official, usually top-down, memorials are initiatives driven from below by artists, political groups or communities determined to publicly recall the memory of victims overlooked or denied by State policies. For example, this bottom-up trend led to the creation of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience in 1999. There are countless grassroots and civil society memorial initiatives on all continents that may complement, react to, or even directly oppose representations of official historiography. A. The Joinet-Orentlicher and the Van Boven-Bassiouni Principles 27. At the international level, two sets of basic principles have been developed in the area of reparations and the fight against impunity, which must be taken into consideration. 28. First, Louis Joinet, the former Special Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, listed a Set of Principles for the protection and promotion of human rights through actions to combat impunity, focused on four pillars of transitional justice: the rights to know, to justice and to reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/20/Rev.1). The right to know is defined not only as the right of individual victims or close relatives to know what happened (the right to truth), but also as a “collective right, drawing upon history to prevent violations from recurring in the future” (Ibid., para. 17). According to Principle No. 2, “A people’s knowledge of the history of its oppression is part of its heritage and, as such, must be preserved by appropriate measures in fulfilment of the State’s duty to remember. Such measures shall be aimed at preserving the collective memory from extinction and, in particular, at guarding against the development of revisionist and negationist arguments.” 29. Mr. Joinet affirmed the need for actions based on memorialization: “On a collective basis, symbolic measures intended to provide moral reparation, such as formal public recognition by the State of its responsibility, or official declarations aimed at restoring victims’ dignity, commemorative ceremonies, naming of public thoroughfares or the erection of monuments, help to discharge the duty of remembrance” (Ibid., para. 42). Mr. Joinet’s Set of Principles was expanded upon by Diane Orentlicher, the independent expert appointed to update the Set of Principles, to become the Updated Set of Principles for the protection and promotion of human rights through action to combat impunity, with similar elements on the duty to preserve memory (E/CN.4/2005/102 and Add.1). 30. Principles developed in other reports by the Special Rapporteur of the SubCommission, Theo van Boven (E/CN.4/1997/104), and the Special Rapporteur of the 7

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