The Platform of European Memory and Conscience (PEMC) says its 2026 nominee Arūnas Bubnys helps society recognize distortions of historical truth. Before PEMC members turn that claim into an international credential, they should know the record attached to his state service.

Arūnas Bubnys has been nominated for the 2026 Prize of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience (PEMC). LRT reports that the Platform-prepared candidate overview, as reproduced by the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC), praises more than forty years of scholarship, archival work and state service and says his work helps society recognize distortions of historical truth.

That description makes the nomination testable. Bubnys did not arrive at LGGRTC when he became director in 2021. LRT records that he headed the Centre’s Historical Research Department from 2009 to 2021 and has led the institution since April 2021. That chronology does not prove that every Centre publication passed through him personally. It does make the Centre’s historical output relevant when state service is itself offered as a reason for the prize.

LGGRTC is not an outsider to PEMC. It was one of the Platform’s founding members in 2011 and remains a member today. PEMC’s published 2024 Council agenda expressly excluded membership applicants and candidates from discussion and voting on their own applications. The prize item, by contrast, records presentation of prize candidates followed by a secret ballot and states no parallel recusal rule. If another rule governs the prize, PEMC can identify it.

For PEMC members and anyone evaluating this nomination, the supporting PEMC due-diligence documentary appendix collects the principal documents, dates, preserved captures and public source links used here.

What PEMC should disclose

The public nomination announcement does not identify the nominator. If the identity is confidential under a PEMC rule, the Platform can say so and cite the rule. If it is not confidential, it should disclose whether the nomination came from LGGRTC, another Lithuanian member, another member institution or the Platform’s leadership.

The same answer should state whether LGGRTC may vote on the candidacy of the man who leads it. A founding member’s current director is being considered for an award by the body that member helped create. That is a recusal question before it is anything else.

PEMC and the Noreika test

In 2019 Lithuania’s own International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes rejected central elements of LGGRTC’s treatment of Jonas Noreika. Its Holocaust sub-commission called the Centre’s exculpatory arguments and obfuscations “utterly unacceptable” and said the ghetto-as-haven theory “recycles the Nazi argument of 1941.” After quoting the Centre’s accusation that I had selected documents without proper context, the Commission added: “It seems obvious that the Center has adopted much the same........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)