Armenian Genocide reparations

The issue of Armenian Genocide reparations derives from the Armenian Genocide of 1915 committed by the Ottoman Empire. Henry Theriault, writing in the Armenian Weekly, states these might be of financial, estate or territorial nature, and could cover individual or collective claims as well as those by the Republic of Armenia. It is questioned whether the Republic of Turkey, successor state to the Ottoman Empire, will ever enter the debate, or whether Turkey bears any legal responsibility to make reparations for events that occurred under another state.

Although the Turkish government has previously acknowledged "a massacre, even a crime against humanity", the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was in the past charged with "insults to Turkishness" for writing about the incident. In 2003, it introduced a law requiring schools not to use the term "genocide" when teaching the subject. In contrast, Former Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee, Professor Alfred de Zayas, Geneva School of Diplomacy, stated:

Because of the continuing character of the crime of genocide in factual and legal terms, the remedy of restitution has not been foreclosed by the passage of time. Thus the survivors of the genocide against the Armenians, both individually and collectively, have standing to advance a claim for restitution. This has been also the case with the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, who have successfully claimed restitution against many States where their property had been confiscated. Whenever possible restitutio in integrum (complete restitution, restoration to the previous condition) should be granted, so as to re-establish the situation that existed before the violation occurred. But where restitutio in integrum is not possible, compensation may be substituted as a remedy.

Apart from the one to one and a half million deaths, Armenians lost all their wealth and property and received neither compensation nor reparations. Businesses and farms were lost, and all schools, churches, hospitals, orphanages, monasteries, and graveyards became Turkish state property. In January 1916, the Ottoman Minister of Commerce and Agriculture issued a decree ordering all financial institutions operating within the empire's borders to turn over Armenian assets to the government. It is recorded that as much as 6 million Turkish gold pounds were seized along with real property, cash, bank deposits, and jewelry. The assets were then funneled to European banks, including Deutsche and Dresdner banks.

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Wikipedia