La consagración jurídica de testigos olvidades. El juez argentino frente al genocidio armenio

Abstract

“The Turkish state perpetrated the crime of genocide against the Armenian people between 1915 and 1923”. This statement, made in Buenos Aires on 1 April 2011 by an Argentinian Federal Judge, constitutes the core of a court decision that is the first of its kind in the world and that offers a legal consecration – (re)cognition – of the forgotten witnesses of a crime denied by Turkey. The sentence takes its place in an altogether singular framework: the sui generis judicial practice of juicio por la verdad (trial for the truth), a national procedure created in Argentina in the 1990s in response to the politics of forgetting then related to the crimes committed during the military dictatorship. This practice is the direct product of an initial situation of effacement and impunity which calls for the creation of alternative judicial mechanisms of validation of the criminal fact and consecration of its victims/witnesses.