The International Criminal Court should new Armenian genocide petition,, ICC’s first Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo says in an article published by POLITICO.
Last month, the California-based Center for Truth and Justice (CFTJ) petitioned the International Criminal Court (ICC), where I served as the first chief prosecutor, to investigate Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev for genocide against Armenians in Armenia — and it’s a petition the ICC should consider.
“It’s a bitter reality that more than a century after the first widely recognized genocide of the modern era, where over a million Armenians were slaughtered by the Ottomans, Armenians are again the victims of genocide,” Mr. Ocampo says.
“Indeed, soon after the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited Azerbaijan to show his support. And Western political leaders seem to support Aliyev too — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has even called Azerbaijan a “crucial partner”,” he adds.
“All this is a sobering reminder of how little we’ve learned from history, and how vulnerable we still are to evil. In 1932, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud, arguing that extreme nationalism could beget violence on a huge scale. It’s time the world understood this as well — and created new strategies to stop all genocide,” Ocampo continues.
