COURT CONFIRMS VERDICT AGAINST PERINCEK
Swissinfo, Switzerland
Dec 19 2007
The Swiss Federal Court has confirmed the sentence given to a Turkish
politician, Doðu Perincek, for denying the 1915 Armenian massacre
was genocide.
The district court in Lausanne originally found Perincek guilty
of racial discrimination in March and ordered him to pay a fine of
SFr3,000 ($2,600) – a charge against which he appealed.
He was also handed a suspended fine of SFr9,000 and ordered to pay
SFr1,000 to the Swiss-Armenian Association as a symbolic gesture.
Perincek’s lawyer said that his client would certainly appeal to the
European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against the decisinn.
The president of the Turkish Workers’ Party had repeatedly denied
during a visit to Switzerland in 2005 that the First World War era
killings of more than 1.5 million Armenians amounted to genocide.
Under the Swiss penal code any act of denying, belittling or justifying
genocide is a violation of the country’s anti-racism legislation.
Lausanne is the capital of canton Vaud, one of two Swiss cantons,
along with Geneva, where the parliaments have voted in recent years
to recognise the Armenian massacre as genocide. The Swiss government
has not done so though.
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