Top lawyers’ group in Kurdish-majority Turkish city calls for reckoning with ‘Armenian genocide’
The main lawyers’ group in Kurdish-majority Diyarbakır province, which has faced prosecution over earlier April 24 statements, has called for Turkey to confront the 1915 mass killings and deportations of Armenians, saying the events are “widely defined internationally as genocide.”
In a statement on Friday the Diyarbakır Bar Association said the events of 1915 left wounds not only in the memory of Armenians but also in the memory of the broader society. It said Armenians, whom it described as one of the peoples of what is now Turkey, were forced into deportation, killed on deportation routes or left to die under the support and control of the Committee of Union and Progress, the then-ruling party of the Ottoman Empire.
The association said there had been no reckoning with the truth in more than a century and that justice had not been achieved for the suffering of Armenians.
“Remembering those who lost their lives in the Armenian Genocide of 1915 is essential for protecting the sanctity of the right to life, the inviolability of human dignity and the necessity of historical justice,” the statement said.
The bar association said crimes against humanity can be overcome only when they are not denied, when society confronts them and when accountability is established.
It said confronting history and truth was not only a way to ease past suffering but also a responsibility under international legal norms to prevent similar suffering in the future.
The Diyarbakır Bar Association said it commemorated those killed in the genocide and called for a process to uncover the truth for a future based on peace and human rights.
Armenians, along with many historians and governments, say 1.5 million Armenians were killed through massacres, forced deportations, starvation and death marches under Ottoman rule during World War I. Turkey accepts that many Armenians died during the war but denies that the killings amounted to genocide or that there was a state policy to destroy Armenians as a people.
April 24 is marked by Armenians worldwide as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. It commemorates the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in İstanbul, then the Ottoman capital, on April 24, 1915, an event widely seen as the start of the massacres and death marches.
The Diyarbakır Bar Association has faced repeated legal action over its April 24 statements. Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) reported in 2024 that the bar had faced eight investigations under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code over statements issued between 2017 and 2024. Article 301 criminalizes “insulting the Turkish nation” and state institutions and has been used in cases involving speech describing the 1915 events as genocide.
Six trials over the bar’s statements from 2017 to 2022 had ended in acquittal by February 2025. Investigations into the 2023 and 2024 statements are reported to be ongoing.
