Armenian Genocide, a Century on

Vicken Cheterian

 

Geoffrey Robertson started his talk at the Responsibility 2015 conference in New York by telling the story of his great-uncle. William Robertson was an Australian soldier in the allied forces who in 1915 was sent to fight against the Ottoman army and, hardly twenty-four hours after disembarking at Gallipoli and joining his comrades in a charge on the cliff-top defences, was felled by a sniper or machine‐gunner.

European Court of Human Rights Hears Genocide Denial Case Perinçek vs. Switzerland

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) held a Grand Chamber hearing on January 28, 2015 in Strasbourg (France) in the case of Dogu Perincek v. Switzerland. The case stems from a Swiss court verdict that in 2007 fined Perincek, a Turkish ultranationalist activist and chairman of Turkey’s Workers’ Party, over his 2005 statement calling the Armenian Genocide an “international lie.” In appealing to the ECHR, Perincek’s defense argued that the Swiss court violated Perincek’s right to freedom of expression; the court ruled in their favor in December 2013. On March 7, 2014, Switzerland filed an appeal, which led to today’s hearing.
A first-rate legal team, which included renowned human rights lawyers Geoffrey Robertson and Amal Alamuddin Clooney, as well as Armenia’s Prosecutor General Gevorg Kostanyan, represented Armenia at the ECHR.The government of Switzerland has also joined the appeals process, as have two Turkish human rights organizations that have submitted legal briefs in favor of Armenia.

Geoffrey Robertson puts the case against Turkey for 1915 Armenian genocide

Louis Nowra

 

On April 24, 1915, the day before the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli, the Turkish government in Constantinople rounded up hundreds of Armenian artists, intellectuals, academics, priests and community leaders and killed most of them.

At the time there were 15 million Turkish Muslims and about two million Christian Armenians in Turkey (or Anatolia as it was then). The Armenians were better educated and wealthier than most Turks and because of that were envied and hated, so much so that the government instituted a program of ethnic cleansing. The Turks had had practice runs before. Between 1894 and 1896, 200,000 Armenians were massacred by soldiers and armed mobs.

Geoffrey Robertson and the Armenian Genocide in Australian Television

Australian barrister, writer and former international judge Geoffrey Robertson, who lives in London and wrote a devastating critique of the British government's recent attitude towards the issue of the Armenian genocide (2009), has recently authored An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians. He was interviewed by "Lateline," the ABC (Australian Broadcast Corporation) program on October 20, about his efforts to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, his views on the Armenian genocide, and the Islamic State atrocities and killings in Iraq and Syria. Below is the excerpt of the interview that deals with the Armenian genocide.