The Times (London), UK
Jan 28 2015

Honeymoon is over as Mrs Clooney makes genocide denial appeal in Strasbourg

by Frances Gibb, Legal Editor

Amal Clooney will make her first court appearance today since her
highly publicised wedding when she appeals on behalf of Armenia in a
case over denial of the country’s genocide 100 years ago.

The UK-based barrister is bringing an appeal in the European Court of
Human Rights in Strasbourg that seeks to “put the record straight”
after Dogu Perincek, the Turkish opposition Labour Party leader, was
cleared of genocide denial charges.

Perincek, who will attend today’s hearing before the court’s grand
chamber, was found guilty by a Swiss court in 2007 after he made a
speech calling the Armenian genocide of 100 years ago “an
international lie” during an event in Lausanne, Switzerland.

However in 2013, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Swiss
legislation criminalising the denial of genocide violated the right to
freedom of expression.

The court granted leave to appeal to its grand chamber, however, and
today Amal Clooney, with Geoffrey Robertson, QC, the head of Doughty
Street, her London chambers, will argue that the original ruling by
the Strasbourg court was wrong.

Mrs Clooney will tell the Strasbourg judges: “The most important error
in the court’s judgment is that it has cast doubt on the fact that
there was a genocide against the Armenian people 100 years ago.

“The court did not explain why it was overruling the Swiss courts,
which heard and examined evidence on the matter,” she will say.
“Instead the lower court reached its conclusions without using any of
the fact-gathering tools available to it.”

The court, she will argue, did not request documentary evidence,
examine witnesses, call experts nor conduct on-site investigations.”

She will ask the court for the opportunity to submit “overwhelming”
evidence that systemic atrocities occurred that would now be
characterised as genocide.

Mrs Clooney, who is also advising the Greek government on the return
of the Elgin marbles, will tell the court that contemporaneous
photographs show death marches and concentration camps where
“thousands of Armenians perished”.

Images depict beheadings, burnt bodies, railway carriages packed with
Armenians heading east into the desert and the Euphrates river filled
with blood, she will say. There are also scores of witness accounts
from journalists and a “mass” of diplomatic cables sent from
ambassadors back to their capitals and now in state archives.

In a joint statement issued on May 1915, France, Great Britain and
Russian denounced the “crimes of Turkey against humanity and
civilisation”. Only Turkey has denied the genocide, she will argue.

The Strasbourg court’s ruling last year contained errors that caused
Perincek and his supporters to celebrate it as a vindication of their
anti-Armenian views, she will argue – adding that some parts of the
judgment “harm the court’s credibility and dishonour the memory of
those who perished in the Ottoman empire a century ago”.

“We hope that the Grand Chamber will set the record straight.”

Mr Robertson, who is leading the appeal, will say that Article 10,
that guarantees freedom of expression, is the European Convention’s
way of saying “Je suis Charlie” – in that it permits the exchange of
information, criticism and satire, however offensive.

The European ruling last year promotes the idea that the “Holocaust is
the only ‘real genocide’, with others forever relegated to the realms
of theory and debate.

“What matters to Armenians, to Jews, to Bosnians or to Rwandan Tutsis
is not the manner of their deaths, 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 Tutsis.”