Human Rights and Democracy - Official Documents

Andrew presented the revised UK country report on Holocaust education, prepared
by the Institute of Education’s Holocaust Education Development Programme at the
University of London. This was the first time that any member country of the Task
Force has revised, updated and resubmitted its country report and, in addition to
providing compelling evidence of the UK’s world leading research position into the
challenges and opportunities of teaching this complex subject in the school
classroom, clearly dispels common myths and misconceptions about the status of
Holocaust teaching in the UK.
At its meeting in May, the 11 member-country governing body of the International
Tracing Service (the Holocaust-era archive in Bad Arolsen) agreed a revised
governance structure for the Tracing Service. This new structure establishes it as
“an organisation with international character” with the capacity to act under German
law and a role for an “institutional partner” which would work with the governing body
and the director of the Tracing Service to implement the organisation’s objectives. It
was also agreed that the institutional partner’s role would be set out in a second
agreement to be negotiated during 2011. At the end of the year, discussions were
ongoing under the Polish chairmanship and we hope these will be concluded shortly.
The two agreements will then be brought into force simultaneously. We will continue
to work to ensure that the final agreements support the long-term future of the
Tracing Service in terms of ensuring the archive remains intact, conserves its
holdings and guarantees accessibility. At the same time, discussions are ongoing
with a number of interested bodies and individuals in the UK on the feasibility of
bringing a copy of the Bad Arolsen archive to the UK so that it may be even more
accessible to British historians and others interested in the information which these
very extensive archives contain.
In June the then Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer hosted a ceremony in Prague to
adopt a set of guidelines and best practices for the restitution and compensation of
immovable (real) property confiscated or otherwise wrongfully seized by the Nazis,
Fascists and their collaborators during the Holocaust (Shoah) Era between 1933­
1945, including the Period of World War II. The UK was actively involved in the
negotiation of these guidelines, which are a follow-up to the Terezin Declaration
adopted at the June 2009 Prague Conference on Holocaust Era Assets. The
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