Fifteen European sites honouring the memory of victims of past injustice and human rights abuses have formed a “European Sites of Conscience” network to promote awareness of current xenophobia and racism in Europe.

They include the Museum of Free Derry, which commemorates Bloody Sunday and the troubles in Northern Ireland; the Terezin Memorial in the Czech Republic, which records the sufferings of Jews in concentration camps during the Nazi occupation; and the Hadamar Memorial in the state of Hesse, Germany, erected to the memory of handicapped and mentally ill people put to death under Nazism.

At a conference at Monte Sole near Bologna, members of the network said they would address present-day injustices involving immigration and xenophobia. “Each of our sites remembers particular histories and tells particular stories, but the common and universal themes of difference and exclusion lie at the heart of all of them” said Nadia Baiesi, director of the Monte Sole Peace School, which hosted the meeting.

The Sites of Conscience network will also include the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz in Germany — where Hitler’s “Final Solution” for the extermination of European Jews was planned — and the Bois du Cazier in Belgium, a former mine where immigrants worked in the 1950s.

Héctor Timerman, the Argentine Ambassador to the United States, who took part in the conference, said: “Places of memory help to connect us to the human experience and consequences of conflict, and provide us with a critical perspective on how to recognise and deal with these issues today. We need historic sites to become active participants in the struggles against racism and xenophobia in our societies.”

The European project will be part of an international network of Sites of Conscience including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in the United States, the Gulag Museum in Russia, and the District Six Museum in South Africa. It has 1,800 members in 90 countries.

The Monte Sole Peace School Foundation commemorates the massacre between September and October 1944 of 770 people killed by Nazi SS troops with the help of local Italian Fascists. The area is today a park containing the ruins of villages. The foundation holds an annual summer school bringing together young people from Italy, Germany, the Palestinian territories and the Balkans.