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A court has acquitted 11 executives of the Diyarbakır Bar Association in southeastern Turkey of charges stemming from a 2021 statement commemorating the victims of the mass killings of Armenians, marking the sixth time the bar’s leaders have been cleared in similar cases, the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) reported on Thursday.
The case involved former bar president Nahit Eren, vice president Mehdi Özdemir and nine executive board members who were accused of “insulting the Turkish nation and state” under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code for issuing the statement on April 24, 2021, marked as “Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.”
The defendants were cleared of all charges during Thursday’s hearing at Diyarbakır’s 2nd High Criminal Court, attended by representatives from the Human Rights Association (İHD), the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TİHV), the Association of Lawyers for Freedom (ÖHD) and Diyarbakır branch of the Rights Initiative.
With this ruling, all six cases filed against the bar’s leaders under Article 301 between 2017 and 2022 have resulted in acquittals.
In a statement released in 2021 the bar called for acknowledgment and recognition of the mass atrocities committed by the Ottoman authorities against the Armenian minority during World War I.
After the statement, titled “We Share the Pain of the Great Catastrophe,” was published on the bar association’s social media accounts and website, a complaint was filed against its executives. This resulted in a criminal case under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which carries a prison sentence of one to three years.
The indictment cited the statement as evidence, pointing to passages that described April 24, 1915 as “a dark day” for a society that had “lived together for centuries, learned from one another, and thrived in pluralism.”
It also criticized the Turkish state’s approach to the issue, saying, “Every April 24, the Turkish government and bureaucracy react with anxious tension, ignoring the darkness of the great catastrophe that lingers over us while keeping count of who calls it what, engaging in a struggle against the truth.”
The statement also called for historical reckoning, saying, “Today, our duty is to shed light on the darkness, to face the truth no matter how painful and to provide a measure of peace to the souls of those who lost their lives in the great catastrophe.”
The Armenians — supported by historians and scholars — say 1.5 million of their people died in a genocide committed by the İttihat Terakki government of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Turkey accepts that both Armenians and Turks died in huge numbers as Ottoman forces fought czarist Russia. But Ankara vehemently denies a deliberate policy of genocide.