Memory laws are often accused of enforcing an inaccurate, manipulative or populist view of history. Some are also said to violate fundamental rights, in particular the right to free speech. These accusations are not entirely unjustified. Yet, a discussion of memory legislation that concentrates on these faults might be missing its mark. The main problem with memory legislation is not necessarily with the merits of any particular law. Rather, the determination of historical facts is not the kind of matter that should be entrusted to the legislator in the first place. The role of legislation is to make social cooperation possible despite substantial disagreement, but only when such social cooperation is indeed required. Disputes about historical facts, I argue, are not a coordination problem that requires a legislative solution. Still less can they justify legal coercion.

This article theorises the nexus between mnemonical status anxiety and militant memory laws. Extending the understanding of status-seeking in international relations to the realm of historical memory, I argue that the quest for mnemonical recognition is a status struggle in an international social hierarchy of remembering constitutive events of the past. A typology of mnemopolitical status-seeking is presented on the example of Russia (mnemonical positionalism), Poland (mnemonical revisionism), and Ukraine (mnemonical self-emancipation). Memory laws provide a common instance of securing and/or improving a state's mnemonical standing in the relevant memory order. Drawing on the conceptual analogy of militant democracy, the article develops the notion militant memocracy, or the governance of historical memory through a dense network of prescribing and proscribing memory laws and policies. Similar to its militant democracy counterpart, militant memocracy is in danger of self-inflicted harm to the object of defence in the very effort to defend it: its precautionary and punitive measures resound rather than fix the state's mnemonical anxiety problem.

This article analyzes the evolution in international law of the obligation to search for and return the remains of forcibly disappeared and missing persons. Receiving the remains of forcibly disappeared and missing persons is one of the primary needs of their families, who bring the issue to international courts and non-judicial mechanisms. This obligation has been incrementally recognized and developed by different human rights courts, which have included the obligation to search for and return the remains of disappeared persons in their remedies. In parallel to the development of the obligation by international courts, the international community has begun to become more involved in assisting in return of the remains of forcibly disappeared and missing persons to their families.