Spoznanja zgodovine − nauk za boljše razumevanje ali sredstvo za politično obračunavanje

Abstract

REALISATIONS OF HISTORY – LESSONS IN BETTER UNDERSTANDING OR THE MEANS OF POLITICAL CONFRONTATION

The author – lawyer and professor of criminal law – explores the attitude to World War II and reconciliation, a topic dividing Slovenians politically ever since World War II and especially after the Slovenian attainment of independence and restoration of political plurality. He establishes that the fact that we have different standpoints is not problematic. What represents a problem is that those who are currently in power understand their position as an opportunity to seize all of the state and social mechanisms with the ambition of controlling and supervising everything, including history. The author believes that historians and lawyers, especially experts in criminal law, are brought together by a similar task: the search for truth, in the sense referred to in law as a historical event. He emphasises that historians are enforcing an elementary idea by seeking the truth about the individual disputable events, times and people; while lawyers attempt to achieve positive results with supposedly preventive norms of national and international criminal law. The state and status of today's international criminal law is the result of the developments in the last twenty years or so, when after the fall of the Berlin Wall the circumstances facilitated the process of the establishment of the rule of law, which is to replace the arbitrary and vengeful right of the stronger with a legitimate, legal, credible and just trials in front of international courts.