Research seminar information
Time: Friday, 26.9.2025, 13:00-14:00 (UTC +3 / Helsinki time)
Place: Room 247 (2nd floor), Unioninkatu 33 (inner courtyard), you can also
Genocide and the Legal Politics of Memory in Germany
Germany’s self-proclaimed reckoning with its responsibility for the genocide of European Jews, and its constitutional identity as a repudiation of National Socialism, have profoundly influenced both its contemporary legal culture and the foundational principles of its statehood. This legacy continues to shape jurisprudence, particularly in matters concerning historical memory and the limits of permissible speech. The ongoing genocide against Palestinians by the Israeli state has become a crucial test case for the coherence of Germany’s legal and ethical commitments. This lecture analyzes cases from German law involving the politics of memory, including prosecutions for so-called Holocaust relativization and incitement to racial hatred, to explore how legal mechanisms ostensibly designed to prevent the recurrence of genocide are, paradoxically, being deployed to silence critique and suppress dissent regarding an unfolding genocide.
About the speaker
Nahed Samour has studied law and Islamic studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard and Damascus. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin, and held a Post Doc position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland and was Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advance Study. She has taught as Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy from 2014-2018. From 2019-2022, she was Core Emerging Investigator at the Integrative Research Institute Law & Society.