Rybna 9, Praha 1: Restitution and Memory in International Human Rights Law

The history of Rybna 9, Praha 1 - a building in the old city of Prague - illustrates how international human rights law, producing new forms of legal right and obligation, participates in the turbulence of modernity. With its capacity to remember the past through the discourse of human rights, international law engages and formalizes a politics of collective memory. This article explores the relationship between international human rights law and collective memory in the context of challenges to post-communist restitution initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe. Rybna 9 formed the basis of one such challenge before the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Other restitution cases have proceeded to the European Court of Human Rights. Whereas the Human Rights Committee is willing to remember certain pasts as a matter of equality, the European Court of Human Rights approaches equality with a modernist impulse to repudiate history. This divergence is especially acute when comparing how the field engages the collective memories of Jews and the Holocaust and those of Sudeten Germans after the war. International legal engagement with the politics of collective memory thereby reflects broader debates about the emergent nature of European citizenship.