WORLD HISTORY AND FACTS

Mass grave. Armenian genocide, undated. [Public domain] Human Rights Court: Denial of Armenian genocide is not a crime. The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Thursday (15 October) that a Turkish politician should not have been prosecuted for denying that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey in 1915 was a genocide. Switzerland had violated the Turkish politician’s right to freedom of speech by convicting him for denying that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 amounted to genocide, the Court ruled. In a landmark free speech ruling, the ECHR judges ruled by 10 votes to seven that Dogu Perincek, chairman of Turkey’s Patriotic Party, should never have been convicted of racial discrimination by a Swiss court for saying that the “Armenian genocide is a great international lie”. Perincek was convicted and fined in 2007 after a series of press conferences on the topic, which the ECHR ruled was an infringement on his right to free speech. In its judgement, the cou