Strasbourg, 24 January 2020 - Annual commemorations will be held to remember the Holocaust in many countries on Monday. It is our collective duty to honour the millions of Jews murdered, along with many other victims, in one of the darkest pages of Europe’s history. And it is our duty to reflect on the significance of that tragedy for our own times and for the future.
This year’s International Day of commemoration marks 75 years since the liberation of the largest concentration camp and extermination centre, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives. Only 7,000 of the victims of that Nazi camp saw its liberation.
European countries have been building institutions to fight the evils that allowed such atrocities and have committed to the obligation to fight hate speech, hate crime and discrimination and to prevent genocide. Yet, that endeavour has not yielded the results we hoped for. Antisemitism, hate speech and hate crimes are again on the rise across our continent.
