Though she's mostly known for being the woman who married George Clooney, Amal Alamuddin Clooney's one of the most recognized lawyers in the human rights field, and she's now taken on the case of the Armenian genocide denial in the Human Rights Court of the European Union.
For a full century, the government of Turkey has created a defense based on the Armenian genocide denial, tweaking the death toll for the event and even refusing to call the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 a genocide; in a case that has reached the highest court of the EU on the matter, Amal Alamuddin Clooney has stepped up in defense of the Armenian people.
As Time Magazine reports, the current case regarding the Armenian genocide denial saw its birth in a 2005 Swiss court room: a Turkish politician named Dogu Perinçek, from the Turkish Workers' Party, was convicted in Switzerland for racism, after having called the Armenian genocide of 2015 an "international lie."
According to The Chicago Tribune, Perinçek's conviction was later overturned, in 2013, when the European Court of Human Rights released him saying that it was an issue of freedom of speech; last Thursday, the acclaimed human rights lawyer said it was very hypocritical of the Turkish government to put forward that defense, considering their "disgraceful" record on the subject of freedom of expression.
As Today's Zaman reports, the Swiss government asked the Court to reconsider in 2014; now, the case is up for appeal in the same Strasbourg court.
Of course, the new Armenian genocide denial case has reached news sites around the world for two different reasons: the fact that it's an important case in human rights and freedom of expression ... and that Amal Alamuddin Clooney, George Clooney's new wife, is the person defending the Armenian people.
As Clooney was defending her point, she stated that the "most important error" in the ruling that released Perinçek in 2013 was that it put Armenia in a tough spot, as it "cast doubt on the reality of the Armenian genocide."
The ultimate goal is that, eventually, the Turkish government will stop the Armenian genocide denial.
