The Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group (AGRSG) recently
completed its final report, titled, “Resolution with Justice:
Reparations for the Armenian Genocide.” The report offers an
unprecedented and comprehensive analysis of the legal, historical,
political, and ethical dimensions of the question of reparations for the
Armenian genocide of 1915-23, including specific recommendations for
the components of a complete reparations package.
Prior to the formation of the AGRSG, the limited discourse on
reparations for the genocide included abstract notions of territorial
return, consideration of particular aspects such as insurance lawsuits,
and sometimes valuable short works treating the issue, but all without
comprehensive or detailed analysis.
After early agreement that some form of repair is an appropriate
remedy for the legacy of the Armenian Genocide as it stands today, the
AGRSG prepared a preliminary report, which was released for limited
distribution in 2009. Completion of the draft was followed by three
symposia. The first was a panel discussion featuring three of the report
authors, held on May 15, 2010 at George Mason University in the United
States, in conjunction with the university’s Institute for Conflict
Analysis and Resolution. The second was a major day-long symposium
featuring the four co-authors and a number of other experts on
reparations for the Armenian genocide, conducted at the University of
California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law through its International
Human Rights Law Association, on Oct. 23, 2010. The third was a panel by
two of the report authors held in Yerevan, Armenia, on Dec. 11, 2010.
The AGRSG is now in the process of widely distributing its final report,
an extensive revision and updating of the 2009 preliminary report.
The AGRSG’s final report remains the only systematic,
all-encompassing, in-depth approach to Armenian genocide reparations.
It examines the case for reparations from legal, historical, and ethical
perspectives (Parts 4, 5, and 6, respectively), offers a plan for a
productive reparative process drawing on transitional justice theory and
practice (Part 7), and proposes a concrete reparations package (Parts 3
and 8). The report also includes background on the Armenian Genocide
(Part 1) and the damages inflicted by it and their impacts today (Part
2). Through its broad dissemination, this report fills a crucial gap in
the scholarly work and policy discourse on the Armenian genocide. It
will give Turkish and Armenian individuals, as well as civil society and
political institutions, the information, analysis, and tools to engage
the Armenian genocide issue in a systematic manner that supports
meaningful resolution.
In the past few years,
reparations for the genocide have gone from a marginal concern to a
central focus in popular and academic circles. Much of that focus has
been on piecemeal individual reparation legal cases. This report
represents a decisive step toward a much broader and all-embracing
process of repair that is adequate to resolve the extensive outstanding
damages of the genocide. Furthermore, genuine, non-denialist engagement
with the legacy of the genocide is growing in Turkey. Finally, in the
past decade, there has emerged a global reparations movement involving
numerous victim groups across an array of mass human rights violations.
The Armenian case has a place within that movement.
The complete final report will be available in PDF format online, at www.armeniangenocidereparations.info/. The Executive Summary and Introduction of the final report are already available on the site.
"The Armenian Weekly," September 20, 2014
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