Solidarity with the Victims of All Genocides
Armenian Genocide Legal Initiative
c/o The Temple of Peace, Cardiff
[email protected]
00447718982 732
Geoffrey Robertson QC’s Legal Opinion on the Armenian Genocide is
unopposed and unchallenged in the UK Parliament
Today on 14th December 2009, Geoffrey Robertson QC, in a meeting
organised by the British Armenian All Party Parliamentary Group,
developed the conclusions of his Legal Opinion into the Armenian
Genocide and the present Labour government’s ten-year campaign to
mislead parliament on this foreign policy and ethical issue. This
administration has continued to maintain that it has examined the
issue when it had not, that it sought expert opinion when none was
sought, and advances arguments for its policy that are demolished in
the Legal Opinion.
Baroness Cox detailed the long and continuing campaign in parliament
for this deplorable policy to be exposed and the truth to be revealed.
The legal opinion has been circulated to all forty senior jurist
members of both Houses of Parliament, to leading barristers and
university departments in this field of human rights and international
relations. No-one has challenged the central tenets of this
ground-breaking Legal Opinion.
There has been no reaction from the British Government nor from the
Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Based on new material obtained under
the Freedom of Information Act, the findings of the QC’s report are so
stark that challenging this independent analysis exposes the web of
lies that has already been spun over all these years.
This marks a milestone as the end of the UK government’s policy
towards the Armenian Genocide from Denial to an Embarrassed Silence, a
matter that has no statute of limitations and concerns the very moral
character of any government anywhere.
A spokesman for the Armenian lobbying group said: "Up to June 2007 the
government line was that `there was no sufficiently unequivocal
evidence" and "historians are divided on the subject". When this was
proved to be false, they have now recourse at new argument: that
Genocide Recognition is a matter for Turkey and Armenia, not for the
outside world. This ignores the conclusions reached by the most
eminent historians of this topic, and the self-evident truth that
genocide denial always demonises the victims, while exonerating the
perpetrator. This should not be the basis of foreign affairs and
ethical policy of any civilised government. The British stance
supports the present policy of the Turkish authorities who prosecute
any individual who dares to challenge the official line on history,
and denies ethnic and religious minorities the rights enjoyed by the
majority. The reality is that this encourages the extreme nationalist
forces prevalent in that country that maintain that the "noble Turk"
who would be incapable of crimes such as Genocide, and also that to be
a Turkish citizen is synonymous with being an ethnic Turk. The UK
government’s accommodation of these ideologies is sadly reminiscent of
the appeasement of the Nazis in the late thirties."
Today we can legitimately claim that the government has failed to rise
to the challenge of defending its policy of collusion with the Turkish
State’s denial of its criminal past. Gordon Brown, the only trained
historian in this administration, should have justified its policy,
for the government’s silence speaks volumes.
"In view of this new crime of Turkey against humanity and
civilization, the Allied governments make known publicly to the
Sublime Porte that they will hold all members of the Turkish
Government, as well as those officials who have participated in these
massacres, personally responsible’." Allied Powers’ statement, 24 May
1915
"` … neither this government nor previous governments have judged
that the evidence is sufficiently unequivocal to persuade us that
these events should be categorised as genocide, as defined by the 1948
UN Convention on Genocide’."
Lord Malloch-Brown, Hansard, Written Answers, 4 March 2008
"`Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) has consistently (at least until
2007) wrongly maintained both that the decision is one for historians
and that historians are divided on the subject, ignoring the fact that
the decision is one for legal judgment and no reputable historian
could possibly deny the central facts of the deportations and the
racial and religious motivations behind the deaths of a significant
proportion of the Armenian people. HMG has also maintained the fiction
that it is somehow contrary to legal practice to apply the description
`genocide’ to events that occurred prior to 1948. This and other
mistaken or illogical arguments have been made, so the internal policy
memoranda reveal, in a hitherto successful effort not to upset the
`neuralgic’ Turkish government. The dubious ethics involved in this
approach have been acknowledged (once, back in 1999) but there appears
to be no interest in establishing the truth of the matter or
re-asserting the position that HMG took at the time, or in
understanding (let alone applying) the modern law of genocide
… … There is no recognition at all of the importance of nations
acknowledging their past crimes against humanity, or of supporting the
descendents of victims who still, almost a century later, have to live
with the consequences’."
Geoffrey Robertson. Was there an Armenian Genocide?
Legal Opinion, October 2009