Genocide Denial Research Articles

Trivializing atrocities: examining the phenomenon of genocide denial in Bangladesh and the triumphalism of perpetrators

This work tried to demonstrate the persistence denial regarding the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide, outshined by other past atrocities. The study examines both Pakistani government views and developing denial narratives within Bangladesh, exploring justifications used to downplay the genocide, including politicization of tribunals and falsified casualty counts. The research argues that triumphalism is not a distinct phase of denial, but rather an intrinsic element of it. Furthermore, the study emphasizes the disturbing lack of recognition for the Bangladesh Genocide in academic circles, particularly in comparison to the focus on Western genocides. The study concludes by proposing for a more balanced approach to genocide scholarship, assuring proper recognition of all such disasters.

Shaping historical consciousness: the language of Armenian genocide denial in Turkish school textbooks

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the depiction of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish textbooks and examines correlations between changes in Turkish political dynamics and their impact on these educational resources. It analyzes concepts, methodologies, and linguistic constructs used to describe the ‘1915 incident,’ tracking their evolution from 1980 to the present. The study also considers how events like the 1980 coup d’état, rising nationalism, and the Islamization of politics influenced textbook content, alongside changes during Turkey’s bid for European Union membership. Despite a stated aim of historical accuracy in these textbooks, the research hypothesizes that their content is significantly shaped by the prevailing political climate. This work provides insights into the complex relationship between politics and historical representation in educational materials.

The True, the Good, the Spiteful: An Auto(bio)psy of Bosnian Refugee Experience in Sweden

This article employs the Bosnian notion of “inat,” often translated as spite, to perform auto(bio)psy of my writing about refugee lives in Sweden. Methodologically speaking, I begin with an assertion that the hybrid form of auto(bio)psy, a method that entangles creative and critical reflection, helps capture what it means to live with the traumas of war, especially in the face of genocide denial and genocide triumphalism. The value of such a reflection that is neither entirely academic nor entirely artistic, neither a court testimony nor data gathered by a disinterested scholar, lies in the possibility of accessing truths that are as material and as emotional as they can be and hopefully, help us better understand uprooted families from 1990s Bosnia and beyond. Following Wendy Pearlman, I argue for the value of emotional sensibility for more profound scientific discoveries. Furthermore, I argue for the need to reconsider the form-content question in the scholarly understanding and analyses of displacement.

“Celebrating” Srebrenica Genocide: Impunity and Indoctrination as Contributing Factors to the Glorification of Mass Atrocities

ABSTRACT This paper provides an analysis of the politics and culture of 20 years of genocide denial in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and neighbouring Serbia and Croatia. It shows how denial at the political level spilled over to a culture of genocide, which is pervasive, from public spaces to schools, art, sports and popular culture. I argue that without significant revision of the Criminal Code and a radical reform of education, we can expect to see continuation of the denial of the Srebrenica genocide for many years to come.

GENOCIDAL STRATEGIES REGARDING UKRAINE IN RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA DISCOURSE

Among researchers and scholars of legal sciences, the issue of recognizing several crimes committed by Russia against Ukraine and its population as genocide is currently under discussion. Instead, at the level of media discourse, a number of researchers have determined that Russian propaganda discourse contains genocidal features (for example, M. Ryabchuk, T. Snyder). In particular, scientists take into account such strategies as denial of genocide as a strategy for committing genocide (S. Cohen, A. Jones), dehumanization and demonization (H. Stanton, B. Bahador), manipulative use of the term «genocide» by Russian propaganda (V. Romaniuk, O. Dudko, E. Fortuin). The purpose of the article is to determine the genocidal strategies regarding Ukraine in the Russian propaganda discourse based on their compliance with the ten stages of genocide developed by H. Stanton: 1. classification; 2. symbolization; 3. discrimination; 4. dehumanization; 5. organization; 6. polarization; 7. preparation; 8. persecution; 9. extermination; 10. denial. In the article, these stages are superimposed on the Russian propaganda media discourse and considered in the context of the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine. The compliance analysis was carried out based on the following criteria: intensity of hateful rhetoric, narrativization, and organization of the media system of the Russian Federation (level of state intervention in the agenda of information media resources). The case of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, which was followed by mass killings of civilians, destruction of residential areas, and deprivation of living conditions of Ukrainians (such as shelling of energy infrastructure), was chosen for analysis. The article analyzes how the physical actions of the Russian Federation against Ukraine are reflected in the propaganda media discourse and how they correspond to the stages of committing genocide, according to H. Stanton. In particular, the stages of classification, symbolization, dehumanization, polarization, and extermination in the Russian propaganda discourse can be considered as a manifestation of hateful rhetoric of varying intensity by increasing it with each stage concerning a certain group. The stages of discrimination, preparation, persecution, and denial are mostly revealed at the level of narratives about Ukraine, and the stage of organization is revealed in the media system of the Russian Federation.

Variations on a Dirge of Extermination: “Der Zor Çölünde” and the Armenian Genocide

In one of his lectures at Northwestern University, Eli Wiesel (1977) stressed that “if the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.” However, Wiesel suggested the generation of the Holocaust and most likely have forgotten the eyewitness survivors of the Armenian Genocide. In this article, I focus on a specific kind of testimony that emerged amongst the survivors of the Armenian Genocide: the song-testimony. Thinking about music and sound is important as the experience of genocide stretches far beyond the visual-oriented notions of such tragedy. It is in this spirit that I write this essay to investigate “Der Zor Çölünde,” a series of song-testimonies that musically charts the experience of Armenians during the Genocide of 1915–1923. I primarily argue that Armenian deportees appropriated the musical and lyrical template of “Der Zor Çölünde” by creating new verses. In doing so, Armenians illustrated and immortalized what they saw, felt, and experienced during the deportations and forced marches. Considering the multifaceted nature of “Der Zor Çölünde,” this essay reimagines the Armenian Genocide experience through the voice(s) of its protagonists. Furthermore, I emphasize the importance and implication of listening to the performances of “Der Zor Çölünde” against the official narratives of genocide denial.

Mapping Massacre and Restorative Justice: A Study of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

The research article delves into human emotions, particularly during Sri Lanka's civil war, and it is analysed through the lens of Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje. It investigates the country's tumultuous condition caused by various separatist organisations, as depicted in Anil's Ghost. The focus of the research is to analyse the series of historical events that occurred in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of colonisation. The study explores the historical intricacies of the Civil War as reflected in the novel's primary narrative. The main emphasis is on the author's factual presentation, which increasingly emphasises the values of peace and solidarity of humanity. This examination analyses Gregory H. Stanton's final stage of genocide denial. It investigates the government's practice of concealing the corpses of deceased people's remains during armed conflict. The concept of mapping is brought with regard to the Massacre during war. The overarching goal of this research is to uncover the shortcomings of the Human Rights Commission within a nation embroiled in conflict. This endeavour brings attention to the inherent dangers faced by members of human rights organisations during the tumultuous period of Sri Lanka's civil war.

Genocide by Other Means: Heritage Destruction, National Narratives, and the Azeri Assault on the Indigenous Armenians of Karabakh

The propaganda efforts of the authoritarian Aliyev regime in Baku and the general Western ignorance of the history of the South Caucasus have contributed to the lack of meaningful response to the genocidal aggression that Azerbaijan has inflicted on the indigenous Armenians of Artsakh, known to many as Nagorno-Karabakh. The humanitarian crisis created by the Azeri blockade of the Lachin Corridor is only the most recent step in a process of cleansing the region of its Armenian population, a process that began in the early years of the twentieth century. The Ottoman Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915–1923 is not a distinct event of the past but a process whose ideology is central to the Azeri-Turkish genocidal violence perpetrated against Armenians in the present. An integral component of the processes of genocide is cultural heritage destruction as noted by Raphael Lemkin. The erasure of most signs of the indigenous Armenian presence on its historic homeland was particularly pronounced in the decades following the Armenian Genocide and continues today. Cultural erasure went hand in hand with Turkish state genocide denial and the rewriting and mythologizing of its national narrative. Azerbaijan has been following a similar playbook since the collapse of the Soviet Union. These genocidal processes of denial, heritage destruction, and the rewriting of history are what I describe as “genocide by other means.”

Genocide Denial and Ways to Confront It Legally, A Comparative Historical Study

Genocide Denial and Ways to Confront It Legally, A Comparative Historical Study

Building monuments, unleashing anger: The material disruption of contested memoryscapes

This paper explores the post-war memoryscapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina via (defaced and destroyed) monuments evidencing the habitual struggle to disrupt and reorder space, and reinterpret the traumatic past. Analysing a combination of digital and fieldwork data, I make a case for interpreting attacks on monuments as a civilian retaliatory agency, exerting spatial hegemony and substantiating resentful affective regimes (especially in relation to the most recently imposed legal ban on the denial of genocide in Srebrenica). In doing so, I consider how citizens’ “truths” are enacted by distorting loss and violence, while collective trauma persists. This paper further illustrates how peculiar remembrance practices modify the standard purpose and meanings of a monument, contextualizing monuments within a larger framework of post-conflict spaces.

Criminalization of denial of the genocide of the peoples of the USSR as an infringement on historical truth

The article is devoted to the problem of the current state and prospects of the criminal legal regulation of the denial of genocide in Russia. The issue is considered in the context of the implementation of the state task of protecting historical truth, enshrined in Part 3 of Article 67.1 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and other legal acts. Historical truth is socially significant reliable information about historical events related to ensuring the security of Russia, consisting of accurately confirmed historical facts. From 2020 to the present, the genocide of the peoples of the USSR has been established by court decisions in 13 regions of the Russian Federation, which gives information about these events both confirmation and public significance. Analysis of the current criminal law has demonstrated that in its version, denial of the genocide of the peoples of the USSR is not a crime. The discovery of legal and social grounds leads to the conclusion that it is necessary to criminalize the genocide of the peoples of the USSR. The experience of regulating liability for genocide denial in European countries does not allow us to recommend it for reception. The experience of criminalization of such an act in the Republic of Belarus is considered preferable. As an alternative to it, a new version of Part 1 of Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is proposed, providing for responsibility for denying the genocide of the peoples of the USSR.

The 2021 Memory Law in Bosnia and Herzegovina – Reconciliation or Polarization?

ABSTRACT In July 2021, the outgoing international High Representative (HR) of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) imposed a set of amendments to the Criminal Code of BiH, which outlawed the denial of genocide and relativization of war crimes. The decision was largely welcomed by Bosniaks but met with animosity to many in the Bosnian Serb entity and sparked one of the worst crises in post-war BiH. In this article, we demonstrate that because of the manner of the adoption and the legal stipulations, the HR’s decision played straight into the raging BiH memory wars. It exacerbated tensions and distrust in state institutions, rather than contributing to reconciliation and peace as intended. We present a two-pronged argument, aligned with the scholarship that critically assesses external transitional justice. First, we argue that a punitive memory law adopted in such an opaque and elite-driven manner can hardly contribute to reconciliation in a divided post-war context as it does not contribute to an inclusive societal discussion about the past but merely silences the most outrageous dissenters. Second, even the minimal objectives of curbing hate speech and incitements of hatred – which some memory laws achieve – has delivered mixed results in the BiH case due to the poor design and implementation of the law. We showcase how the practical application has stalled, laying bare the weak capacities of state-level institutions, further reducing public trust in their functioning – the opposite of what was declaratively intended.

ІНФОРМАЦІЙНА ВІЙНА СРСР (1945 – ПОЧ. 1980-Х РР.): ЯК ПРОПАГАНДА ПЕРЕТВОРИЛА СВІДЧЕННЯ УКРАЇНЦІВ ПРО РЕПРЕСІЇ ТА ГОЛОД 1932–1933 РР. НА «ПРИГОДНИЦЬКІ РОМАНИ»

Notion of Holodomor as an invention of “Ukrainian nationalists” and “Nazis” circulated in world information sphere since the end of WWII. Gradually, with more oral history written, with more documents being declassified and more researches done, Holodomor reconstituted its place in Ukrainian historiography, collective memory and state commemorative traditions. The goal of the article is to reveal five vectors, and at the same time – means of Soviet/Russian propaganda, applied toward theme of the famine in the frames of the genocide denial instrument called «manipulation». These are: direct accusations of involvement into Nazism; deepening of mental abyss between free and Communist worlds; exploitation of a thesis “conquerors are not judged” as the result of the victory in WWII; legal proceedings; Sovietology studies. Weigh of each component varies and is of more or less power. The first proposed instrument had the most long-lasting and powerful effect. It basically tied the whole national Ukrainian movement and ideology to Nazism. Its consequences and echo were still visible till the beginning of full-scale war in 2022. The next three instruments were connected to WWII and thus their influence gradually weakened. Chairs of Sovietology, like the first vector, also remained strongholds of anti-Ukrainians and pro-Soviet/Russian imperial narrative till 2022, when many historians faced the necessity to rethink their previous assessments of Ukrainian history, including the Holodomor. Therefore, proposed by the author vectors and instruments used in propagandist campaign against the Holodomor both show their long-lasting influence and deconstruct the Soviet-Russian imperial myth.

Transnational Activism against Genocide Denial: Protesting Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize in Literature

AbstractThis article addresses the protest against the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke as an example of transnational memory activism. It analyzes from a transnational mobilization perspective how activists achieved a globally visible protest in Stockholm and what role memory played in the protest mobilization and framing. Genocide survivors and former refugees, human rights activists, journalists, and academics formed a transnational protest coalition. In this way, they drew international attention to their outrage at the honoring of an author who is criticized for denying the Bosnian genocide. The analysis shows that memories of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and genocide united the diverse protesters as a “memory community” and shaped their framing. The protesters warned of the potential repercussions of the Nobel Prize to Handke for the internationalization and normalization of genocide denial. They argued that locally, Serb nationalist politicians can find legitimation in it for divisive politics. Moreover, they put the prize in a larger context of globally rising right extremism and islamophobia that find inspiration in the very Serb nationalist ideology and its propagators of the 1990s conflict.

Haunted by Denial

On a sweltering August afternoon in 2018, my uncle and I walked into a Namibian national museum mandated to narrate the long durée of the country’s history from the prehistoric to the modern present. The previous week, I had watched a handover ceremony on television in which Germany returned the skulls of genocide victims to Ovaherero community representatives for burial. I wanted to know how the museum was stewarding those sacred remains.Shortly after entering, we encountered a white man who we quickly identified as a member of the museum’s staff—one we later learned had held that post since before Namibia’s independence in 1990. My uncle introduced us, telling the staffer I was writing a dissertation about German colonization and the 1904 Ovaherero and Nama genocide. The man quickly retorted, “Don’t you know the entire genocide is a hoax!” He proceeded to candidly share with us, a pair of Black African strangers, his grand theory of how the British fabricated the “so-called genocide” as a way of discrediting Germany. He even recommended German-speaking farmer and amateur historian Hinrich R. Schneider-Waterberg’s mammoth denialist text Der Wahrheit eine Gasse: Zur Geschicte des Hererokrieges in Deutsche-Südwestafrika 1904–1907 (roughly translated to The Gap in the Truth: The Story of the Herero War in German Southwest Africa 1904–1907) as a much-needed historical correction to my work.When his denialism of the Ovaherero and Nama genocide turned into Nazi apologia—Frantz Fanon aptly articulated the intimacies between antisemitism and negrophobia—the stiff upper lip of my already flimsy scholarly resolve began to waver. My need to perform an objective sociological documentation of this staffer’s denialism crumbled as I held the implications of his words for the country and institution in which he wielded no small power over collective memory. Fighting back tears, I tersely thanked him for his time. I walked quickly out of the museum, and began to sob in the unforgiving Windhoek sun. Like Fanon, “at the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.”1This curator was neither my first brush with institutionalized genocide denialism nor with denialism(s) in the Namibian context. But I was struck by his frankness. It forced me to realize that denialism is not simply a falsehood or an incorrect knowing: it is its own epistemic condition with its own rationale and empiricisms. In the years that followed, as I became more familiar with the affected communities’ struggle for recognition by the German state, I have come to recognize the constellation of registers of denialism: Germany making reference to the “alleged genocide” and “alleged concentration camps” in court while confining genocidal responsibility solely to contemporary definitions is, unequivocally, denialism.2Marc Nichanian wrote that “genocide is not a fact” because it is “the very destruction of the fact.”3 This is not to give credence to denialisms (they would persevere regardless), but to emphasize how denialism represents a matrix of competing geopolitical, ethno-racial, cultural, religious, and other regimes of facticity and memory that comprise the event-process-structure of genocide. As a recurrent feature of genocide, denialism is an epistemicidal form, a recursive murder of knowledge and destructible evidential truth that supplements and reiterates the physical act of killing.I am haunted by denialism, and denialism itself is a haunting. After my run-in with the denier in the museum, and after visiting Armenia and learning about genocide denial at the level of the nation-state, my archival engagement hovers somewhere between séance and exorcism.4 Investigating these spectral traces, whether the arrogant noise of imperial might or the indigenous African metaphysics that erupt normative space-time and scientific empirics, means following a sociogenic path that “lead[s] to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.”5Competition between recognition and denial is necessarily zero-sum, and the stakes of remembering are the stakes of Black life itself. Jackie Sibblies Drury wrote that “the most tragic death is the death that is elided over as history is canonized”; this elision is “if not a fate worse than death, perhaps a death worse than death.”6 Denialist confabulations haunts victim-survivor communities as a trauma that re-kills the dead and re-wounds the living who are engaged in a perpetual struggle for recognition and reparations. Against this, insurgent haunting by various ancestor-ghosts offers “its own form of resolving.”7 It is toward this resolution with those ancestors that my own historical engagement is aimed.

КРИМІНАЛІЗАЦІЯ ЗАПЕРЕЧЕННЯ ГОЛОДОМОРУ У КОНТЕКСТІ ЄВРОПЕЙСЬКОГО ДОСВІДУ ЗАБОРОНИ ЗАПЕРЕЧЕННЯ ГЕНОЦИДУ

The article highlights the problems and prospects of establishing of criminal lability for Holodomor denial in the context of the experience of criminalizing genocide denial, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in European countries. Significant part of western researchers considers that the prosecution of persons who deny genocide should take place primarily in those countries where the mass extermination of large human groups took place in the past and whose society has knowledge of the relevant historical context. Criminalization of denials of genocide in European countries took place in stages. During the 1990s, France, Germany and Belgium established criminal liability for denying the crimes of the Third Reich, including the Holocaust. At the beginning of the XXI century several countries in Eastern and Southern Europe introduced responsibility for the denial of crimes committed by Nazi and communist totalitarian regimes. The next stage of the criminalization of genocide denial began in 2015–2016, it consisted in the establishment of a general ban on denial of all cases of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, without excluding. Spain, Italy, Germany and others countries of Europe adopted laws of this plan. Currently, international law does not require punishment for genocide denial, but there are noticeable trends leading to the establishment of such a universal norm. Between 2003 and 2008, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Parliament issued a series of decisions that justified the right of democratic countries to restrict freedom of speech on issues related to the denial of the Holocaust and others crimes of the Nazi totalitarian regime of the Third Reich. Genocide denial is a violation of the right to respect for human dignity – not only victims of genocide, but also their descendants are considered victims in cases of this kind.

Legal aspects of liability for Holocaust denial in Russia (through the prism of Roman Yushkov case)

The article expounds upon the issue of Holocaust denial and freedom of expression in the context of Roman Yushkov Case, who posted a link on his social network page to the article claiming that the number of victims of the Holocaust is greatly exaggerated and well below six million. Roman Yushkov’s was charged under Art. 281 Part 1 and Art. 3541 Part 1 of the Russian Criminal Code. A Jury acquitted him, having considered the arguments provided by the defence about Yushkov’s intentions only to stimulate a public debate about the number of the Holocaust victims by his publications. The Supreme Court upheld this decision. In this paper will examine the history and development of Holocaust denial, will examine Holocaust and other genocides laws globally. The author describe how the trend of the revisionism. Revisionism is an academic approach that recognizes that traditional narratives of history may not be entirely accurate and should be reviewed and revised as new information comes to the surface. At the national level have enacted a variety of laws, ranging the criminalize Holocaust denial and other genocides, Nazi ideology promoted through speech, symbols or public association or can be used to prosecute individuals who deny the Holocaust. These laws are intended to prevent the return any public reemergence of Nazi views. There are now essentially four types of regimes in this domain, in terms of scope of the offence of genocide denial. Most nations of the European Union (as well as Israel and Russian Federation) criminalize Holocaust denial. Despite the threat of criminal prosecution, however, Holocaust denial have taken on a cult-like following of their own on the internet. The article concludes about the contradictory of Russian law enforcement practice, Russian judicial system drawbacks, as well the system preparation of representatives of the legal profession.

CONTRADICTING HISTORICAL REVISIONIST MEMORY POLITICS, ETHNONATIONAL COLLECTIVISM, AND ANTI-TRANSFORMATION OF CONFLICTS IN FORMER-YUGOSLAVIA

The paper analyzes the normative-formative framework that denotes the connection between memory and identity as a crucial origin of conflicts. In addition to concerns about memory politics, historical revisionism and ethnonational identity collectivism, the paper dissolves the connection between phenomena highlighting outcomes of the peace process, transitional justice, and its ethical/moral connotations. The study argues that Western Balkan’s sociopolitical stability depends on declining conflicting and contradictory memory order within radical sociopolitical processes. The revisionist contention memorializes conflicts and wars as the fundamental concept of ethnicity/religion/nation. It overlaps with the neoliberal and neoconservative reduction of all competitive relations, in which only the stronger have the right to existence. Discarding dominant ethnopolitical narratives is essential for conflict transformation and transitional justice for all ethnoreligious communities. The Balkan historical events and conflicting memory (WW2, Yugoslav wars) caused sociopolitical dominion shaping the collective behavior of ethnic groups. The damaging ethnic/religious practice of genocide denial and honoring war crimes within people’s social lives can become a matrix for future conflicts. Placing memory politics with radical populism is a critical condition of collective identity politics in the former Yugoslavia. Scientific rationality can provide a solid path through the anomalies in the form of political ideologies.

Hagop Mnts‘uri’s The Second Marriage: Armenian realities in the pre- and post-genocide Ottoman Empire and Turkey

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the novella Ergrort Amusnut‛iwně (The Second Marriage) by Hagop Demirciyan (pen name Hagop Mnts’uri) in a larger historical context including the conditions which led to the Armenian genocide, the ramifications it had on the life of the survivors and the irreversible realities it created in post-genocide Turkey. Published in Istanbul in 1931, the book represents the deep historical and structural differences between Istanbulite Armenians and those from the provinces. Reading and explaining these differences in their context through the lenses of Mnts’uri’s characters as well as through the lens of the literary theories of uneven development, I argue that the Armenians in the provinces and in Istanbul were deeply separated from each other, becoming non-contemporaneous contemporaries. This unevenness was coupled with genocide denial in the decades after 1915, imprisoning the survivor as kaght’agan 2 within silence over generations, not just in Istanbul but also the communities where they sought refuge abroad.

Genocide denial and freedom of political expression in the Ingabire case

ABSTRACT: Despite the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda having convicted numerous genocidaires, some genocide sympathisers still deny the genocide. Such a corruption of scholarship inflicts secondary victimisation on Tutsi ethnic minorities. In Ingabire Victoire Umuhoza v Rwanda the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights rejected an opposition leader’s conviction and sentence for her ‘double genocide’ statement, finding that the state could have adopted less restrictive measures to attain legitimate national security purposes. To evaluate Rwanda’s genocide minimisation laws criminalising public incitement to divisionism, this article applies Waldron’s argument endorsing hate speech regulations in liberal democratic societies. Comparisons are made with the ‘Auschwitz lie’ laws in European continental jurisdictions and common law countries. Provided that the dignity of affected persons is eroded by discrimination and defamation, even the European Court of Human Rights upholds genocide denial laws. The US Constitution does not do so. Instead, critics of hate speech regulation encourage civic dialogue to retain the issue of genocide in public memory. Counterfactually, Cohen praises the minority who refuse to deny the pain and suffering of others. Because theory matters, I use the Millian principles to analyse the African Court’s interpretation of the Rwandan Supreme Court’s Ingabire decision, in relation to the state’s expressive freedom obligation in article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
 
 TITRE ET RÉSUMÉ EN FRANCAIS: Négation du génocide et liberté d’expression politique dans l’affaire Ingabire
 RÉSUMÉ: Certains partisans du génocide continuent de nier le génocide bien que le Tribunal pénal international pour le Rwanda ait condamné de nombreux génocidaires. Une telle corruption dans la littérature inflige une seconde victimisation aux minorités ethniques tutsi. Dans l’affaire Ingabire Victoire Umuhoza c. Rwanda, la Cour africaine des droits de l’homme et des peuples a rejeté l’inculpation et la condamnation d’un leader de l’opposition pour propos qualifiés de « double génocide » en estimant que l’État aurait pu adopter des mesures moins restrictives pour atteindre des objectifs légitimes de sécurité nationale. Pour évaluer les lois rwandaises relatives à la minimisation des crimes de génocide et qui criminalisent l’incitation publique au divisionnisme, cet article applique l’argument de Waldron adoptant les règles relatives au discours de haine dans les démocraties libérales. Des comparaisons sont faites avec les lois de « Auschwitz » dans les juridictions continentales européennes et les pays de la tradition common law. Pour autant que la dignité des personnes affectées est érodée par la discrimination et la diffamation, même la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme retient la légalité des lois sur la négation du génocide. Il n’en n’est pas ainsi de la Constitution américaine. Au contraire, les détracteurs de la réglementation du discours de haine encouragent le dialogue civique à maintenir la question du génocide dans la mémoire publique. A l’inverse, Cohen loue la minorité qui refuse de nier la douleur et la souffrance des autres. Parce que la théorie compte, j’utilise les principes de Mills pour analyser l’interprétation donnée par la Cour africaine de la décision rendue par la Cour suprême du Rwanda dans l’affaire Ingabire, en ce qui concerne l’obligation de liberté expressive de l’Etat énoncée à l’article 9 de la Charte africaine des droits de l’homme et des peuples.