Trapped in Legal Concepts or in States’ Own History? An International Legal Approach to the Reluctance to Recognize the Armenian Genocide

This proposal raises the possibility that, beyond geopolitics, there may be technical reasons for some states not to recognize the Armenian genocide under the label of “genocide”, in application of the legal principle of nullum crimen sine lege. The reason could be that recognizing massacres that occurred before the international legal definition of the crime in 1948 as genocide would open the door to forcing them to confront their own past.
This could be the case of Spain, which has also failed to recognize other historical events that, from today’s perspective, also qualify as genocide, such as the Holodomor in Ukraine. Significantly, this is a country with a colonial past in the Americas over which the word ‘genocide’ hangs, with calls at the highest political level for apologies for the abuses committed.
However, this position contrasts with the attitude towards the Armenian genocide of other states with a record of mass crimes throughout their history. In fact, it could be a way to avoid potential legal effects of the growing global movement to acknowledge past atrocities and deal with their consequences in the present.