TrustHLT/LaCour huggingface dataset:
TP1 (ThirdParty): is not the denial of historical facts, but rather the opposition to the application of the legal concept of genocide to those very facts.
TP1 (ThirdParty): The present case is in no way comparable to the denial of the Holocaust, where the deniers have disputed the historical facts, namely the existence of gas chambers in concentration camps, the mass killings, or the use of poisonous gas.
TP1 (ThirdParty): The applicant has not alleged that the victims falsified history.
TP1 (ThirdParty): On the contrary, the applicant, like the victims and their descendants, acknowledges the historical facts of massacres and deportations.
TP1 (ThirdParty): What the parties disagree about is the legal characterization of these historical facts.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Challenging, the legal characterization of the events of 1915 as genocide does not reveal any racist aims or motives, and thus cannot justify any restriction on the freedom of expression.
TP1 (ThirdParty): The fact that the applicant called the legal characterization of the events of 1915 as genocide an international lie does not provide any evidence of racial discrimination or an attack on the human dignity of Armenians.
TP1 (ThirdParty): The statement is not related to any person or group of persons, but refers to a specific opinion.
TP1 (ThirdParty): At most, it may be related to any holder of that opinion.
TP1 (ThirdParty): In that case, it relates as much to the members of the Swiss National Council who recognized the events of 1915 as genocide as it relates to any Armenian holding that view.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Calling something an international lie is not the same as calling a certain group of persons liars.
TP1 (ThirdParty): As such, it has no racial connotation.
TP1 (ThirdParty): The fact that the applicant described the Ottoman Armenians as aggressors, referred to the ideas of Talat Pasha, stated that he would never change his position, and placed the United States and Europe on par with Hitler, is of no relevance to the present case.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Mr. President, the case before you
TP1 (ThirdParty): concerns the applicant's conviction for denying a genocide in order to denigrate or discriminate against a group of persons on ground of their race.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Racial discrimination must result from the denial of genocide, not from any other opinions uttered by the applicant.
TP1 (ThirdParty): In any case, none of these opinions reveals any motives of racial discrimination.
TP1 (ThirdParty): It should be noted that the applicant was never prosecuted for incitement to hatred or racial discrimination, which are separate offenses under the first paragraph of Article 261bis of the Swiss Penal Code.
TP1 (ThirdParty): While Armenians might find some of the applicant's statements disrespectful, disturbing, or even distressing, such sentiments alone, however understandable, cannot determine the existence of racial discrimination and a violation of human dignity, and thus cannot set the precedent for the future of human dignity.
TP1 (ThirdParty): And thus cannot set the limits of freedom of expression.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Such limits must not be based on the sensitivity of a particular group, but on objective general standards.
TP1 (ThirdParty): The court had to deal with disrespectful and offensive statements on the events of 1915 before.
TP1 (ThirdParty): In Cox versus Turkey, the court held at paragraph 49 that the opinions expressed on these issues by one side may sometimes offend the other side, but that a democratic society requires tolerance and broad-mindedness in the face of controversial expressions.
TP1 (ThirdParty): In Gütli versus Turkey, another case dealing with exactly the events of 1915, the court recalled at paragraph 36, and I quote, if the offending speech contains conclusions and phrases that may offend, shock, or even worry some, especially those who adhere to the views expressed by the authorities of the state, the court has repeatedly stated that such ideas do not lose as such the benefit of freedom of expression.
TP1 (ThirdParty): End of quote.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Mr. President, the objective standard
TP1 (ThirdParty): applied in the cases brought against Turkey should equally be applied in the present case.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Finally, Mr. President, the court
TP1 (ThirdParty): should look at the context in which the applicant's statements were made when reviewing the applicants criminal conviction.
TP1 (ThirdParty): The applicant was and is not alone in opposing the legal characterization of the events of 1915 as genocide.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Considering that several European and other governments have publicly stated that they do not recognize the events of 1915 as genocide, the applicant had no reason to assume that such a position would automatically be treated as racist and as violating the dignity of Armenians.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Challenging the legal characterization of the events of 1915 as genocide does not have the same effect as denials of the Holocaust.
TP1 (ThirdParty): While Holocaust denial nowadays is one of the main vehicles of antisemitism, there is no comparable anti-Armenianism in the world today.
TP1 (ThirdParty): The notion that the denial of the legal characterization of the events of 1915 as genocide may constitute a form of incitement to anti-Armenian feelings, or even incitement to violence, discrimination, or racial hatred against the Armenian people, is not a form of incitement to violence.
TP1 (ThirdParty): The notion that there is a racial hatred against the Armenian community in Switzerland is without foundation.
TP1 (ThirdParty): For all those reasons, the government of the Republic of Turkey respectfully invites the court to conclude that there was no pressing social need for the applicant's criminal conviction, and to hold that there has been a violation of Article II of the Constitution.
TP1 (ThirdParty): Members of the court, on behalf of the delegation of Turkey, thank you.
Dean Spielmann (JudgeP): Thank you, Professor Talmon.
Dean Spielmann (JudgeP): I now call the representatives for Armenia, and first Mr. Kostanyan.
TP4 (ThirdParty): Thank you very much.
TP4 (ThirdParty): Mr. President, Honorable Judges, it's an honor to address you
TP4 (ThirdParty): as the agent of the government of Armenia.
TP4 (ThirdParty): Almost 100 years ago, the Ottoman Empire embarked upon a widespread and systematic destruction of the Armenian people.
TP4 (ThirdParty): April 24 this year marks the centennial of that crime.
TP4 (ThirdParty): On that day in 1915, in a planned and cynical manner, they rounded up all key Armenian intellectuals, hundreds of writers, composers, artists, community leaders, and exterminated them.
TP4 (ThirdParty): The Armenian male population, including many in service in the Ottoman army, were massacred.
TP4 (ThirdParty): The women, children, and elders were sent on death marchs through the desert, where they were starved, tortured, raped, slayed.
TP4 (ThirdParty): Well, over half of the Armenian population was deliberately exterminated, a memory that lives on so sorrowfully in the hearts and minds of Armenians.
TP4 (ThirdParty): Those who survived were ripped of everything they had, their family, property, cultural and spiritual heritage.
TP4 (ThirdParty): Those who stayed were deprived of their identity as Armenians.
TP4 (ThirdParty): They lived with changed names, forcefully converted in faith, whispering to each other not to be heard speaking the remains of the Armenian they were able to preserve.
TP4 (ThirdParty): The Armenian nation survived and overcame.
TP4 (ThirdParty): It has never asked this court to pronounce on the suffering it has witnessed, but nor did it expect this court to ever allow the deniers to find a safe haven in its pronouncements, which are already now used for propaganda purposes of falsifying the history.
TP4 (ThirdParty): As an intervener, Armenia's role is to point to the core principles under which this case should be decided, and to indicate errors that have infected the lower court judgment.
TP4 (ThirdParty): Whether or not its conclusion was correct does not matter as much as certain misstatements of fact which have comforted genocide deniers throughout the world.
TP4 (ThirdParty): We are here to ensure that such errors should never be repeated by a court that speaks in the name of human rights.
TP4 (ThirdParty): Mr. President, I would like to introduce Mr. Jeffrey
TP4 (ThirdParty): Robertson, QC, and then Mrs. Amal Clooney, who
TP4 (ThirdParty): will present further submission on behalf of Armenia.
TP4 (ThirdParty): Thank you.
Dean Spielmann (JudgeP): Thank you Mr. Kostanyan. I give the floor to Mr. Robertson.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Mr. President, Honorable Judges, the object of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, as the German
TP2 (ThirdParty): Ambassador Wolf Metternich explained in a cable to Berlin, was, I quote, the elimination of the Armenian question through the extermination of the Armenian race.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It was by a study of what happened to the Armenians, followed by what was happening to the Jews in Germany, that led Raphael Lemkin to coin the term genocide to describe the worst of all crimes against humanity, a crime that all states now have a duty to combat.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The issue in this case is whether the Swiss law under which this man Perinchik was convicted, Article 261bis of the Penal Code, conforms to the freedom of expression guarantee in Article 10 of the European Convention.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Article 10 is the Convention's way of saying, je suis Charlie, in the true Voltarian sense of permitting people to publish information and criticism and satire, however offensive, so long as it doesn't cause harm.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It sets up a presumption, does Article 10, in favor of free speech in a convention that protects other rights to dignity, such as the right to live free of race hatred or discrimination, the right to say, I am Jewish, I am Muslim, or I am Armenian, without fear that the race we happen to be born into will be stigmatized as inferior or subhuman.
TP2 (ThirdParty): That is why Article 10 has its proviso, which permits speech to be restrained by law on those occasions when it is likely to and intended to cause harm, to incite racial violence or hatred.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Now in the mouth of a rabid racist with a doctorate in law and a political party at his back and people waving flags and fists outside this court now, genocide denial can have a double impact.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It makes survivors of genocide and their children and grandchildren feel the worthlessness and contempt and inferiority that the initial perpetrators intended, and it incites admiration for those perpetrators and a dangerous desire to emulate them.
TP2 (ThirdParty): In this case, the Swiss courts decided that Perenchik's intentions were racist.
TP2 (ThirdParty): They decided it.
TP2 (ThirdParty): That his words in the Turkish language were designed to arouse his supporters in Turkey to hate Armenians and to applaud his hero, Talat Pasha, the Ottoman Hitler.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Now we acknowledge that some reasonable people will think the Swiss courts struck the wrong balance and that the antics of a character like Perenchik are laughable rather than dangerous.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Perhaps that doesn't mean the law itself contravenes the convention or that its application in this case should be decided in his favor.
TP2 (ThirdParty): That would only follow if the Swiss courts were outside the margin of appreciation that is permitted to states in regard to laws that have the legitimate aim of combating racial discrimination, the actual crime of which he was convicted.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Well what's the test for determining margin of appreciation?
TP2 (ThirdParty): It depends on whether the statement has any public interest.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Perenchik's provocative expostulation had no value or interest at all.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It had no weight coming from a man who said evidence would never change his mind.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It had no argument.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It was ideologically vapid.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It was made by a man who only came to Switzerland in order to be convicted.
TP2 (ThirdParty): That was its purpose.
TP2 (ThirdParty): So he could be convicted.
TP2 (ThirdParty): He went to Germany and France.
TP2 (ThirdParty): They didn't bite.
TP2 (ThirdParty): They didn't prosecute him.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The other day he tried to go to Greece to expostulate his genocide denial.
TP2 (ThirdParty): They took the less expensive and quicker course of simply denying him entry.
TP2 (ThirdParty): He's a genocide denier forum shopper.
TP2 (ThirdParty): He seeks out countries in Europe where he can be convicted and so by so doing promote himself and his perverse view of history.
TP2 (ThirdParty): In England we'd call him a vexatious litigant, a pest.
TP2 (ThirdParty): So it was absurd for the court below to suggest that his statement had any political, historical, or legal value simply because it was made at a conference.
TP2 (ThirdParty): That makes no difference.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Or because it was part of a heated debate.
TP2 (ThirdParty): There was no debate at all on the three occasions it was made.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It was made merely for the purpose of defying Swiss law.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Calling him a politician, which the lower case court did, gives him perhaps an uncalled for gravitas in his utterances.
TP2 (ThirdParty): He's an incorrigible genocide denier, a criminal, and a vexatious litigant.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The Swiss courts concluded looking at the evidence that his statement was made with racist intent.
TP2 (ThirdParty): So in evaluating the social danger in Turkey, for Armenians in Turkey where his statement was directed, as well as in Switzerland, the court should have a wide margin of appreciation.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Armenia's compelling interest today, as you've seen in its submissions, is to refute certain suggestions in the judgment that there was any doubt over whether the 1915 massacres and deportations amounted to genocide.
TP2 (ThirdParty): We're all agreed today that that's not the issue.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The court in the first paragraph of its judgment on the law said we're not called upon to decide that.
TP2 (ThirdParty): And yet it went on in paragraphs 115 to 117 to actually cast doubt over the genocide and to comfort genocide deniers.
TP2 (ThirdParty): A human rights court comforting genocide deniers by errors, paragraph 115, says there can't be consensus about genocide because only 20 of 190 states in the world have recognized it.
TP2 (ThirdParty): That's obviously a bad point because the vast majority of those states have never been asked, have never considered the matter.
TP2 (ThirdParty): And no state in the world except Turkey has decided that it was not a genocide.
TP2 (ThirdParty): There's no divergence, as the French suggest.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Name another state that has decided formally other than Turkey that it wasn't genocide.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Those that have decided that it was genocide after serious historical and legal inquiry include almost all the major European states, not to mention 43 out of 50 states of the United States, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The court was seriously misinformed by the Turkish government about the UK position.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The UK abandoned its suggestion that the evidence wasn't sufficiently unequivocal.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Some years ago, we can show you on the Foreign Office website that it has currently taken into account decisions on genocide by international courts and abandoned that suggestion.
TP2 (ThirdParty): We do say, the paragraph 117 of the judgment seems to suggest, and I quote, that the 1915 events can never be subject to final conclusions or objective or absolute truths.
TP2 (ThirdParty): If this is what that paragraph really means, that's pernicious nonsense and a grievous insult to every Armenian whose relations were starved and massacred for their ethnicity and their religion.
TP2 (ThirdParty): How can a court committed to belief in human rights and therefore to a belief that those guilty of atrocities can be convicted on evidence that proves guilt beyond reasonable doubt to you that massacres and death marches are, quote, by definition controversial and debatable?
TP2 (ThirdParty): That is for courts to decide.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The paragraph goes on to make an invidious and erroneous distinction between denying the Armenian genocide and denying the Holocaust.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It says, oh, in the latter case, there's concrete evidence of, quote, the existence of gas chambers, unquote.
TP2 (ThirdParty): But here, there is the most concrete evidence of death marches and massacres of laws to expropriate property because they knew the Armenians were not coming back.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Amal Clooney will detail that decision, the evidence of destroying most of the Armenian race.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The lower court then claimed that an international military tribunal at Nuremberg had convicted the Nazis and no such tribunal had convicted the Young Turks.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Well, of course, it had the military tribunal in Turkey.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Applying international military law in 1919 convicted Talat and his gang.
TP2 (ThirdParty): But here, what is worrying is that the lower court is apparently saying that you can't call an atrocity genocide unless there's been an international court conviction for genocide.
TP2 (ThirdParty): That's absurd.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The Holocaust itself wouldn't qualify as genocide under this standard because the judgment in Nuremberg in 1946 made no mention of genocide, which didn't come into existence as a crime until the convention in 1948.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Well, these are egregious errors of Chamber 2, which we urge the ground chamber not to correct, in fact.
TP2 (ThirdParty): They promote the idea that the Holocaust is the only real genocide, with others forever relegated to the realms of history and theory and debate.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Of course, the Holocaust was an appalling example of the worst of crimes against humanity.
TP2 (ThirdParty): But it is wrong to excuse or to minimize other mass murders on the grounds of race and religion because they have fewer victims or different methods of killing.
TP2 (ThirdParty): What matters to Armenians, to Jews, to Bosnians and Bengalis, to Rwandan Tutsis, and today to Yazidis is not the manner of their death or whether an international court has convicted the perpetrators, but the fact that they were targeted as unfit to live because they were Jews or Armenians or Yazidis.
TP2 (ThirdParty): By seeking somehow the lower court to privilege the Holocaust as the only proven genocide, the reasoning in this judgment damages the vital human rights cause of genocide prevention.
TP2 (ThirdParty): So this chamber decides on Article 10.
TP2 (ThirdParty): The perverse notion that there is any doubt about the truth of the Armenian genocide should not feature in its reasoning.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It was not, as genocide deniers pretend, a tragedy.
TP2 (ThirdParty): It was a crime, an international crime of genocide.
TP2 (ThirdParty): Thank you.
Dean Spielmann (JudgeP): Thank you very much. I give the floor to Mrs Clooney.
TP3 (ThirdParty): Mr. President, Honorable Judges, it is an honor to appear before you today on behalf
TP3 (ThirdParty): of the government of Armenia.
TP3 (ThirdParty): As my colleague has explained, our submissions today focus on the need to correct the record in this case.
TP3 (ThirdParty): The most important error made by the court below is that it casts doubt on the reality of the Armenian genocide that the people suffered 100 years ago.
TP3 (ThirdParty): I will argue that first, this finding on genocide was unnecessary in this case, second, that it was reached without a proper forensic process, and third, and most importantly, that it was wrong.
TP3 (ThirdParty): The court itself admitted that it was, quote, not required to determine whether the massacre suffered by the Armenians amounted to genocide.
TP3 (ThirdParty): This is also the position conceded by the applicant and by the government of Turkey, and the government of Armenia agrees.
TP3 (ThirdParty): In addition to being unnecessary, the lower court's comments on genocide were totally unsupported and made without even inviting Armenia's assistance.
TP3 (ThirdParty): The court did not explain why it was overruling the Swiss courts, which heard and examined evidence on the matter, 90 kilos of evidence, we were told earlier this morning.
TP3 (ThirdParty): Instead, the lower court reached its conclusions that the genocide was not proved or even provable, without using any of the fact-gathering tools available to it.
TP3 (ThirdParty): It didn't seek the submission of documentary evidence, it didn't call expert witnesses, it didn't hear fact witnesses, it didn't conduct on-site investigations.
TP3 (ThirdParty): Mr. President, this court is not the forum, and Perinchek is not the case in which to
TP3 (ThirdParty): determine state responsibility for the crime of genocide.
TP3 (ThirdParty): But if this chamber were minded to make such a judicial determination, then Armenia must have its day in court.
TP3 (ThirdParty): We would in that situation welcome the opportunity to submit evidence, which we consider to be overwhelming, that the massacres that killed over a million Armenians would today be labeled as genocide.
TP3 (ThirdParty): It's something we can't possibly do justice to in the few minutes we've been accorded this morning.
TP3 (ThirdParty): In the judgment below, the findings on genocide were simply wrong.
TP3 (ThirdParty): The evidence of atrocities committed against the Armenians, some of which is summarized in the dissenting opinion below, clearly establishes both what happened and the specific genocidal intent behind it.
TP3 (ThirdParty): Contemporaneous photographs show death marches and concentration camps where thousands of Armenians perished.
TP3 (ThirdParty): There are images of beheadings, burnt bodies, railway cars packed with Armenians being herded into the desert.
TP3 (ThirdParty): There are descriptions of the Euphrates River filled with blood.
TP3 (ThirdParty): There are contemporaneous eyewitness accounts by missionaries, by journalists, including scores of articles in the New York Times.
TP3 (ThirdParty): One of these reported Ottoman leader Talat Pasha's chilling resolution that there was, quote, no room for Christians in Turkey.
TP3 (ThirdParty): There is a mass of contemporaneous diplomatic cables dispatched by ambassadors back to their capitals and today still available in state archives.
TP3 (ThirdParty): The Ottoman Empire's U.S. ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, for instance, confirmed that,
TP3 (ThirdParty): quote, a campaign of race extermination is in progress against the Armenians.
TP3 (ThirdParty): Even the ambassador from Germany, Turkey's ally, said that government leaders were admitting that the purpose behind their actions was, quote, the total obliteration of the Armenians.
TP3 (ThirdParty): And in a joint statement issued in 1915, France, Great Britain, and Russia denounced the, quote, crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization.
TP3 (ThirdParty): There are also the Ottoman laws ordering deportations and expropriating the houses and churches of the expelled Armenians.
TP3 (ThirdParty): Mustafa Arif, who was interior minister in the Ottoman Empire in 1917, admitted that his predecessors had, quote, carried out the law on deportation to exterminate the Armenians.
TP3 (ThirdParty): And there is the admission in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 where the government of Turkey undertakes to hand over the persons who were, quote, responsible for the massacres.
TP3 (ThirdParty): There are the verdicts of Ottoman courts, too, convicting the principal perpetrators and sentencing them to death.
TP3 (ThirdParty): This includes the court-martial trial of the Ottoman prime minister, Talat Pasha, as well as other high-ranking officials.
TP3 (ThirdParty): They were all convicted of mass murder rather than the crime of genocide.
TP3 (ThirdParty): When the country's prime minister died today, he finally returned to Turkey after his 40th than the crime of genocide.