TCA ISSUE PAPER-44
June 20, 2008

Swedish Parliament Rejects Armenian Genocide Legislation

The Swedish Parliament in a June 12 vote rejected legislation aimed at recognizing Armenian genocide claims. The measure was rejected by a 245 to 37 vote, with nearly 70 percent of the Parliament voting against the legislation.

The debate in the Parliament which led to the outcome of the vote focused on several points:

  • The legislation wrongly stated that the United Nations designated the events of 1915 as genocide. However, the Swedish Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Commission’s inquiry confirmed that there was never such designation by the United Nations. (H.Res.106 and S.Res.106, in the US Congress, also wrongly claim that the UN has accepted the Armenian claims as genocide). 
  • The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime and Genocide is the authoritative legislation on genocide and cannot be retro-actively applied to cases that took place before the Convention went into effect in 1951.
  • There is no agreement among scholars, historians and other experts on what transpired during the last years of the Ottoman Empire.

Earlier this year, the British Government reiterated its long standing opposition to legislative attempts to designate the events of 1915-16 events as genocide, stating on March 4 that “neither this (British) Government nor previous Governments have judged that the evidence is sufficiently unequivocal to persuade us that these events should be categorised as genocide as defined by the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide.”

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