ECHR rules that Switzerland violated Turk’s right to freedom of speech
The decision of the 17-judge EUROPEAN Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber is final, and puts to rest a string of legal decisions and appeals in the case of Perinçek vs Switzerland dating back to 2007, news reports from Strasbourg say.
Doğu Perinçek, the Chairman of the Turkish Worker's Party, first made headlines in 2005 when he stated during three separate public events in Switzerland that the deaths of between 800,000 and 1,800,000 Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918 did not constitute genocide.
At a celebration of the 82nd anniversary of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which officially established the borders of modern-day Turkey, Perinçek said it was an “international lie” to classify the mass deaths of Armenians near the end of the First World War as genocide.
Because the event took place in Lausanne, Perinçek was allegedly in violation of Swiss anti-racism legislation.
The Switzerland-Armenia Association submitted an official complaint against Perinçek for these comments. He was then charged on the grounds that denying, belittling or justifying genocide violates Swiss anti-racism law. Perinçek was tried and found guilty of racial discrimination by the Lausanne District Court in March 2007, and sentenced to fines and prison time.
The case launched against Perinçek exacerbated longstanding tensions between Turkey and Switzerland, related to the two countries’ conflicting interpretations of the Armenian massacres near the end of the First World War. In 2001 and 2003, the Swiss cantons of Geneva and Vaud had officially recognized the deaths as genocide, and the House of Representatives followed suit at the end of 2003.
April 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the massacres. Turkey has never officially recognized them as genocide, maintaining that the estimate of roughly 1.5 million deaths is inflated.
Switzerland is the first state, which criminalized the denial of the Armenian Genocide. Later it was followed by Slovakia and Greece, where the denial of the Armenian Genocide is also a criminal offense.-0-