Historical Memory Law

The Historical Memory Law (in Spanish: Ley de Memoria Histórica or La Ley por la que se reconocen y amplían derechos y se establecen medidas en favor de quienes padecieron persecución o violencia durante la Guerra Civil y la Dictadura), is a Spanish law passed by the Congress of Deputies on 31 October 2007. It was based on a bill proposed by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The Historical Memory Law principally recognizes the victims on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, gives rights to the victims and the descendants of victims of the Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, and formally condemns the Franco Regime. The conservative Popular Party and the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) both voted against passage of the law. For its no vote the Popular Party accused the Socialist Party government of weakening the political consensus of the transition to democracy and "using the Civil War as an argument for political propaganda," while the Republican Left of Catalonia rejected the law on the basis it did not go far enough.

The main provisions of the law are:

Criticism of the law has come from two sides, those who think that the law is not effective enough and those who support the Pact of forgetting. Doubt has been expressed about how effective the law is as a means of obtaining retroactive justice. Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), the left wing and Catalan nationalist party, opposed the law for not overturning verdicts reached by judges in political trials conducted during the dictatorship, although the new legislation did declare these trials illegitimate. Another example of the limits placed on judicial activity is what happened in 2008 when Judge Baltasar Garzón opened a national investigation into Franco and his allies. He dropped the investigation the same year after state prosecutors questioned his jurisdiction over Francoist crimes. In a 152-page statement, he passed responsibility to regional courts for opening 19 mass graves believed to hold the remains of hundreds of victims. Subsequently a Spanish court upheld the 1977 Amnesty Law, declaring that Garzón had opened the investigation without proper authority.

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