Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution
Abstract
In 2006, France's lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, adopted a bill that would have made it a crime to deny that the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians during and after World War I. Almost simultaneously, Turkish writers and scholars, including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, were being charged by Turkish authorities for precisely the opposite "crime": calling the killing of Armenians by Turks a genocide and, in the process, "denigrating Turkishness.'' These two diametrically opposed events provided an illustrative backdrop to the Denying Genocide: Law, Identity and Historical Memory in the Face of Mass Atrocity conference at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in December 2006, for which the following papers, and others that will appear in the Journal's next issue, were written. The use of law to combat denial was one of the conference's central themes; more specifically, what role can or should law play in determining the limits of historical debate? When are governments justified in limiting freedom of speech to protect other societal rights and interests? The conference also looked beyond the narrow legal questions to comprehend denial more broadly, seeking to understand the genesis of the battle of laws described above and the possibilities of dealing with denial through non-legal methods.
Disciplines
Dispute Resolution and Arbitration | Human Rights Law | Law
Recommended Citation
Belinda Cooper,
Denying Genocide: Law, Identity and Historical Memory in the Face of Mass Atrocity Conference,
9
Cardozo J. Conflict Resol.
447
(2008).
Available at:
https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/cjcr/vol9/iss2/14