How do states cope with past human rights abuses? What is the role of advocacy groups and  which influence do outside actors have on coping with human rights abuses? The panel will explore the question of how severe human rights abuses in Europe are addressed by political leaders, the public, and the law. It will focus on two sets of human rights abuses: a) forced sterilization and genocide, and b) injustices involving communist rule.

Speakers will explore how these injustices are being addressed through transitional justice and which legal, symbolic, and material compensations have been made. The panel builds on comparative research projects including the struggles over moral rehabilitation of sterilization victims in the case Germany, Norway and the Czech Republic; genozide and restaurative justice in the case of Germany; and the clash between the rights of victims and those of perpetrators in post-Cold War Europe drawing on the cases of Poland, (East-) Germany, the Czech Republic and Romania.