A/HRC/28/36 after civil wars, dictatorships or decolonization processes, have produced parallel interpretations that have resulted in parallel realities for people, thus preventing reconciliation. 13. Ms. Stojanovic stated that, although it was almost impossible for two States that were once at war with each other to develop a common narrative of past events, the publication of a Franco-German history textbook provided a successful example of an attempt to do just that. She specified, however, that this success was in large part due to fortunate and rare circumstances, namely, the role of the European Union as a political umbrella for the discussion and the highly developed state of historical and social sciences in France and Germany. 14. However, alternatives to developing a common narrative could be recommended, such as adopting a multi-perspective approach that enabled all voices to be heard. Ms. Stojanovic explained that, as a result of this methodology, four books had been published on controversial issues relating to the wars that took place in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, and that Serbia had started a project involving sixty historians with the aim of writing a book on that part of history. Ms. Stojanovic stressed the particularly interesting role that multiple perspectives could play in turning a controversy into a debate in which all sides could express their interpretation. She underlined the importance of changing the way that history as a subject was taught in schools, from hiding controversies to showing them and opening discussion about the various existing narratives. She recognized that, while it was often impossible to reach a consensus on past events, a fundamental first step was for pupils to be informed about other groups’ perspectives. 15. Ms. Stojanovic noted that history curricula tended to deal solely with political history, which overstressed conflicts, whereas there would be large scope for learning important historical events within social history, for example, including gender-related history. 16. Mr. Adwan co-authored “Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine”, a history textbook written by a group of Israeli and Palestinian teachers. He specified that the publication of the book, the result of seven years of rigorous collaboration, followed the failure by both sides to implement certain terms of the 1993 Oslo Accords relating to the review of the education systems to make them peace-oriented, which had directed both sides to develop a history textbook in the spirit of the Accords. Instead, each side continued to teach its own narrative only. The aim of the history textbook elaborated by Mr. Adwan and his counterparts was to introduce both narratives side by side, giving them equal space. This became possible by choosing to present the textbook in the form of columns, one for each narrative, with an empty space between them for students to write their comments. Mr. Adwan stated that it not only created a sense of equality in terms of the space allocated to each narrative, but also brought a certain symmetry between the teachers despite the existing asymmetry of power between the two States. 17. The main effect of the textbook was to provide Israeli and Palestinian pupils with an opportunity to study each other’s history as well as their own. Mr. Adwan noted that, in doing so, the project fitted into a democratic framework by, inter alia, integrating the right of children to gain access to information and the academic freedoms of teachers and researchers. He expressed the need to move education from being a means of perpetuating the conflict to a means of building peace and stressed that there was scope to learn from each other’s trauma. 18. Mr. Adwan elaborated on some of the difficulties that he and other teachers had encountered during the development and implementation of the project and the challenges that lay ahead. In the developing phases of the project, the ongoing nature of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict made the collaborative process harder than expected, including in terms 5