The Armenian Genocide is one of the heaviest crimes against humanity. It is also the
wound of the Armenian people that won’t heal. Along with remembering the pain suffered, the Armenian Genocide obliges Armenian people to fight for the sake of Armenian national security and the restoration of national just rights – compensation for the territorial, material, moral and psychological damages of the Genocide.
When the Turkish authorities were planning and implementing the plan to exterminate
the Armenian people, the concept of “genocide” did not exist yet. The only section of
international law whose norms were corresponding to the actions taken against the
Armenians during the Armenian Genocide was the law of war and peace, with the relevant Hague conventions adopted in 1899 and 1907.
After World War II, on December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly
adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In it, genocide means any of the following five acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. All these acts characterizing the genocide fully correspond to the methods used for the physical extermination of Armenians during the Armenian Genocide in 1915-1916. Nevertheless, the existence of the Convention had no (and continues to not have) practical significance in preventing the crimes of genocide that occurred in the 20th century and are happening now, as well as in bringing the politicians and states respectively to a criminal and political responsibility because the document has
significant flaws.
In this work, the shortcomings of the Convention are examined on the example of the
Armenian Genocide, which justify the need to revise the document. In particular, the
question of determining the political responsibility of the state for the genocide, regardless of the statute of limitations, the right of the victims of the genocide to receive compensation, including and first of all the right to return to the homeland, the need to provide punishment for forcibly deporting the population from their homeland and carrying out national-cultural genocide, has been examined.
The incompleteness of the provisions of the Genocide Convention affects the process
of international recognition and condemnation of the fact of the Armenian Genocide, because it allows states to bypass the well-known principles and norms of international law, formally justifying this approach with the shortcomings of the document in question.