Court confirms verdict against Perinçek
The Swiss Federal Court has confirmed the sentence given to a Turkish politician, Doğu Perinçek, for denying the 1915 Armenian massacre was genocide.
The district court in Lausanne originally found Perinçek 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.
Perinçek’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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