Abstract:  During the past several decades, intergovernmental organizations ("IGOS"), non-governmental ("NGOs"), governments, and scholars have sought to construct viable mechanisms to establish state responsibility for serious state sanctioned human rights and humanitarian law violations, including abuses perpetrated under predecessor governments. These efforts, although diverse, typically rely on and in turn reinforce legal models and normative actions rooted in international human rights and humanitarian law principles, custom, treaties, resolutions, and juridical precedent, and have become known as measures of "transitional justice."

The last decade has seen increasing scholarship and advocacy focusing on transitional justice processes such as: (1) hearings and trials; (2) truth commissions; (3) reparation programs; and (4) the re-organization of governmental structures to diminish the possibility that abuses will be repeated. Less attention has been given to so-called laws of historical memory, the international norms that should guide these laws and their implementation, or to the normative question of whether laws of memory can be considered justice.

My research aims to contribute to recent discourse about the emerging right to memory and its place in societies such as Spain and the Basque Country where no definitive rupture occurred between a government devoid of democracy and marked by widespread human rights violations, and a government that has taken steps to foster democracy and respect for human rights. I propose that in the Spanish and Basque cases, the implementation of meaningful laws of individual and public memory is a necessary "floor" for justice, acceptance of state responsibility for human rights abuses committed by the Franco government, and proper recognition of the regime's victims. I further posit that neither the Spanish law of memory nor the Basque administrative decree of memory, both of which purport to establish such measures, has succeeded.