ZURICH (Swissinfo.ch) — With the backing of Europe’s top human rights court, a Turkish politician keeps testing Switzerland’s tolerance for freedom of speech.
Dogu Perinçek, chairman of the Turkish Patriotic Party, first made headlines when he said publicly in Switzerland on three different occasions in 2005 that the mass killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces a century ago did not constitute genocide.
Swiss courts in 2007 convicted him of violating Swiss anti-racism law, which forbids denying, belittling or justifying genocide. Perinçek appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, France.
The European court acquitted Perinçek of the racism charges in September 2015 and concluded a month later that Switzerland violated his right to freedom of speech. Since winning his nearly decade-long legal battle, Perinçek has not let up pushing the Swiss on these issues.
During a press conference last week at the Zurich-based Turkish consulate, he blasted his conspiracy theories about recent terror attacks in Europe and said he supported a Swiss lawmaker’s initiative that would provide more legal cover for expressing skepticism about genocide.
Perinçek claimed the United States “is behind” the recent terror attacks in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Turkey because he said it wants to divide Turkey and weaken Europe, the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported.
