Photo credit: the official website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
Paris, 16 January 2026 – The Mediterranean Centre for Peace and Security (CMPS) has submitted its contribution to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, to inform the Rapporteur’s report to be presented at the 63rd session of the Human Rights Council, addressing the challenges posed by denial, negationism, and revisionism of gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law.
The contribution highlights the emergence of contemporary, structured, and strategic forms of denial, which no longer consist merely in contesting facts, but rather aim to durably neutralize mechanisms of accountability, memory, and justice. Drawing on a comparative analysis of Syria, Libya, and the Sahel, CMPS identifies three distinct models of negationism: an institutionalized and bureaucratic denial, characterized by state control over narratives and the use of law to reclassify or erase crimes; a fragmented and competitive denial, driven by non-state armed actors and amplified by social media and digital disinformation; and a sovereignty-based jurisdictional denial, seeking to challenge the very legitimacy of international accountability mechanisms. Although distinct, these strategies produce a common effect: the marginalization of victims, the erosion of the right to truth, and the normalization of impunity.
CMPS draws attention to the direct consequences of these practices for victims, including administrative erasure, the commodification of suffering, jurisdictional isolation, and the durable exclusion from justice mechanisms. In certain contexts, denial does not merely deny the crime, but denies the very legal existence of the victim.
In response to these dynamics, CMPS calls for a coordinated international response aimed at explicitly protecting the documentation of violations within national legislative frameworks on cybercrime and disinformation, strengthening independent mechanisms for digital archiving and evidence preservation, recognizing systematic denial as a practice constitutive of continuing violations, and integrating the negationism of international crimes into targeted sanctions regimes.
Denial is not merely a political discourse. It constitutes a true architecture of impunity. Combating it is a prerequisite for any credible transitional justice.
Read our submission:
Contact: secretariat@cmps-med.org