As a young lawyer from Argentina, I approached HistoCon carrying an obvious parallel in mind: the profound similarities between the National Socialist Dictatorship in Germany and Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976 -1983). The patterns can be traced in the state terror and ideological persecution, the use of military apparatus to control and and subject them to enforced disappearance, torture as a tool of repression, and the attempts to the efforts to conceal the organized nature of the crimes. Knowing this made me naturally drawn to specifically attend the workshop “HistoCourt: History on Trial – How the Law Remembers the Past.” Led by two South African facilitators with domestic insights into their country’s experience of a racially segregated regime, the workshop’s objective was to explore how law functions as a repository of memory.
The starting point of the workshop was a reflection on remembering what happened in South African apartheid. Yet, instead of delving into the legal mechanisms of reparation, the workshop took an honest and necessary step back: to examine how apartheid itself was sustained by a legal framework that institutionalized violence.
The resemblance of South Africa’s case - through laws such as the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) and the Riotous Assemblies Act (1956) - to Argentina’s “Proceso de Reorganización Nacional” was striking. This euphemistic name, used by the military to disguise the dictatorship, masked the regime’s true nature by framing it as a necessary “reorganization” of Argentine society. It was a way to play dress-up with legitimacy, giving genocide the illusion of lawful governance while concealing systematic violence.
The German participants entered the conversation with a striking example, noting how Nazi Germany also used law to enable genocide. The codification of “non-Aryans” through the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 set a starting point to dehumanize Jews: stripping them of citizenship and establishing a racial hierarchy that justified marking of jews. These laws were built upon the authority granted by the 1933 Enabling Act, which allowed Hitler’s government to rule by decree, concentrating legislative authority and paving the way for authoritarian rule.
The workshop continued exploring how, in the face of systematic repression, legal procedures have also served as a powerful instrument of reparation. The landmark Juicio a las Juntas (Trial of The Juntas) in Argentina, held in 1985, set a historic precedent by holding the senior military officials accountable for human rights violations, similar in moral and symbolic significance to the Nuremberg Trials in post-war Germany. Both processes served not only to punish perpetrators but also to create collective memory and validate victims’ experiences.
In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a restorative justice initiative, prioritized truth-telling and acknowledgment, and also laid the groundwork for what became known as transformative constitutionalism, a legal and moral framework that reimagined the role of law in rebuilding a just society from the ruins of apartheid.
As we discussed the legal efforts to preserve historical memory, the workshop confronted a crucial question: Are these frameworks and institutions enough to counter the resurgence of denialism, revisionist narratives, and authoritarian tendencies in today’s political landscape? This question, posed by the facilitators, deeply resonated with me. I shared the example of Argentina, where there are growing calls to “move forward” and leave the past behind. Other participants quickly echoed this, explaining that similar rhetoric exists in their own countries on their tragedies. When taken to its farthest and most disturbing extent, told the Germans folks, the endpoint of such revisionist discourse is not hypothetical: “It has a name, neonazism.” And so, the challenge becomes clear: Can law alone withstand these pressures? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who served as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, said in his opening statement that “these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust.” This quote made me reflect: Just like the Juicio de las Juntas, these legal proceedings, even when limited in their practical reach - similar to how Nuremberg was resignified through the trials - serve as formal acknowledgments of suffering and as affirmations of collective memory.
The HistoCourt workshop message was clear: the fate of memory often rests in courtrooms and congresses; in the words we choose to legalize or outlaw, to remember or to silence. Yet, the law alone cannot be the only safeguard from these atrocities happening again. Only by weaving law together with education, culture, and civil society can we build resilient societies that confront their past honestly and forge a future where “never again” - or Nunca Más - truly means:
never.
again.
This publication does not represent an expression of opinion by the Federal Agency for Civic Education. The author is responsible for the content.