American-Armenian lawyer Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte elected Westbrook City Council president

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YEREVAN, DECEMBER 16, ARMENPRESS. The Westbrook City Council made local history last week in unanimously selecting American-Armenian writer, lawyer, lecturer and human rights advocate Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte as its president, the first refugee and by all accounts the first woman to fill that role, Portland Press Herald reports.

“As a council, we had decided we wanted a woman. We wanted someone to represent those constituents who haven’t had that representation. I look forward to being the facilitator of the discussions,” she said. “One of my major goals is to work more closely with the schools on budgets, so we aren’t surprised when we see it.”

A lawyer specializing in international law, Turcotte has long been involved in advocacy work around her birth city of Baku, Azerbaijan. Turcotte’s Armenian family fled Azerbaijan when she was a child because of attacks on Armenians there. The family spent three years in Armenia before moving to the United States.

After graduating from the University of Maine School of Law in 2003, Turcotte worked as a clerk at the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands. In 2012, she published “Nowhere, the Story of Exile,” a collection of her diary entries as a child fleeing from her homes.

Her political career in Maine began to take shape in 2013 when she successfully worked to get the Legislature to officially recognize the Artsakh Republic.