CivilnetThe European Court of Human Rights held a Grand Chamber hearing on January 28 in the case of Dogu Perincek v. Switzerland. The case concerns the criminal conviction of Perincek, a Turkish ultra-nationalist politician who publicly challenged the existence of the Armenian Genocide in Switzerland.
Perincek, the leader of Turkey’s Workers’ Party while on a lecture tour in Switzerland in 2005 made several public statements where he denied the reality of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, calling it an ‘international lie.’ He was convicted by a Swiss court for those statements in 2007. Switzerland has anti-racism laws that legislate against denying, belittling or justifying genocide. That court decision said that the facts of the Genocide were ‘widely accepted as common knowledge’ and that Perincek’s denial of these facts had racist motives.
Perincek appealed the Swiss court’s decision to the European Court claiming that the Swiss Criminal Code breached his freedom of expression. A majority of five out of seven ECHR judges ruled in favor of the Turkish politician on December 17, 2013 stating that Perincek had exercised his ‘freedom of speech.’ The European Court went further and took the view that the Swiss authorities had failed to show how there was a social need in Switzerland to punish an individual for racial discrimination on the basis of declarations challenging only the legal characterization as “genocide” of acts perpetrated on the territory of the former Ottoman Empire in 1915 and the following years.
The ruling was criticized and highlighted an ingrained double standard because the European Court considered the denial of the Holocaust a crime, but denial of the Armenian Genocide was considered to be an infringement on free speech.
On March 7, 2014 Switzerland filed an appeal that led to the Grand Chamber hearing on January 28.
Following the Swiss appeal, Turkey intervened by submitting their evidence which questioned the veracity of the Armenian Genocide.
On July 15, 2014, Armenia’s Prosecutor General Gevorg Kostanyan announced that Armenia would be submitting a formal request to the ECHR by August 26 of that year to engage as a third party in the case. At the Grand Chamber hearing, Armenia took part with a legal team that included Geoffrey Robertson QC, a preeminent international lawyer and author, who has argued many landmark human rights cases and is the author of “An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians?” international lawyer Amal Clooney, Armenia’s Prosecutor General Gevorg Kostanyan and another government representative Emil Babayan.
For a comprehensive overview of the case, you can read CivilNet’s piece Genocide Denial and Recognition at the European Court of Human Rights.
