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Reuters
December 18, 2013
Denying that mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915 were genocide is not a criminal offence, the European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday in a case involving Switzerland.
The court, which upholds the 47-nation European Convention on Human Rights, said a Swiss law against genocide denial violated the principle of freedom of expression.
The ruling has implications for other European states such as France which have tried to criminalise the refusal to apply the term “genocide” to the massacres of Armenians during the breakup of the Ottoman empire.
A Swiss court had fined the leader of the leftist Turkish Workers’ Party, Dogu Perincek, for having branded talk of an Armenian genocide “an international lie” during a 2007 lecture tour in Switzerland.
Turkey accepts that many Armenians died in partisan fighting beginning in 1915 but denies that up to 1.5 million were killed and that it constituted an act of genocide – a term used by many Western historians and foreign parliaments.
“Genocide is a very narrowly defined legal notion which is difficult to prove,” the court said.
“Mr Perincek was making a speech of a historical, legal and political nature in a contradictory debate.”
