Payam Akhavan is a Professor of International Law at McGill University in Montreal,
Canada, and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. He was previously a
UN prosecutor at The Hague and has served as counsel in leading cases
before international courts and tribunals. He spoke to CivilNet about
his representation of a coalition of Armenian and Turkish NGOs that have
intervened in the Perincek case, heard by the Grand
Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on January
28, 2015. Dogu Perincek, an ultra-nationalist Turkish politician and member
of the Talat Pasha Committee, had been convicted in Switzerland for
incitement to discrimination for having called the Armenian Genocide an
“international lie”. Before the European Court, he succeeded in arguing
that his freedom of expression had been violated, and that he was not
promoting hatred, because he was only questioning the legal
classification of the events of 1915, which he did not deny. After a
campaign by Armenian and Turkish NGOs, the Swiss government was
persuaded to appeal the case to the Grand Chamber of the European Court,
to try and reverse this flawed decision.
