By: Carlos Federico Gaitan Hairabedian
I. Introduction
In December 2000, a descendant of Armenian genocide victims filed an unusual petition before a federal court in Buenos Aires. The claimant, Gregorio Hairabedian, acting on behalf of his family and later joined by Armenian community organizations from Argentina and the wider Armenian diaspora, including the Zoryan Institute, did not seek criminal punishment, civil damages, or a declaration of state responsibility. Instead, the petition invoked a distinct legal claim: the right to the truth. Through this proceeding, the petitioners asked the court to establish the fate and whereabouts of their relatives during the mass deportations of Armenians carried out by the Ottoman Empire in the regions of Palú and Zeitun between 1915 and 1923, and to determine, through a judicially supervised evidentiary process, whether those acts constituted genocide under international law.
What followed was unprecedented. The Argentine federal judiciary accepted jurisdiction not to adjudicate liability, but to conduct an authoritative inquiry into historical facts. This decision was informed by the country’s long experience mobilizing law to confront impunity. In the aftermath of systematic state violence in the 1970s and years of official denial, Argentine courts, working in close collaboration with victims’ organizations, turned to the Inter-American Human Rights Protection System to reopen avenues for truth, memory, and justice within what has become a decades-long transitional justice process.
The Inter-American system, composed primarily of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, has played a central role in this evolution. Through individual petitions, investigations, and binding judgments, these bodies have progressively articulated states’ obligations to investigate grave human rights violations, reject amnesties for mass atrocities, and guarantee victims’ access to truth. Within this jurisprudential framework, the right to truth emerged as an autonomous legal principle guaranteeing victims, their families, and society the right to know what happened in cases of serious human rights violations. Recognized by both the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the United Nations, it obliges states to investigate and disclose the facts even when criminal punishment is no longer possible. Silence and denial, the jurisprudence makes clear, constitute continuing forms of harm that perpetuate impunity rather than close the wounds of past atrocities.
This legal architecture did more than enable domestic prosecutions. Over time, it consolidated the right to truth as an enforceable principle, one that Argentine judges would later apply beyond the country’s own dictatorship, as well as in the judicial recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
During Hairabedian’s trial, the court heard expert testimony, assessed archival evidence, and ultimately issued a judicial determination recognizing that the Armenian population had been subjected to genocidal destruction by the Ottoman Empire and then the Turkish state. In doing so, the proceedings transformed intergenerational family memory into legally validated truth, affirming the standing of descendants as rights-holders and situating their claims within the framework of international human rights law. The case thus illustrates how domestic courts can operationalize the right to truth as an autonomous remedy, even where criminal accountability is legally or politically unattainable.
This raises a broader question: what does a truth-based judicial proceeding concerning the Armenian genocide, adjudicated in Argentina nearly a century later, reveal about the capacity of domestic legal systems to generalize models of accountability for mass atrocities? The Hairabedian case offers a concrete illustration of how the right to truth can operate as a transferable legal mechanism, capable of linking victims, courts, and international norms across contexts. In this setting, the principle of non-repetition does not function through deterrence in the criminal sense, but through the legal establishment of historical facts, the public repudiation of denial, and the preservation of authoritative judicial records. By anchoring mass violence in law rather than silence, truth-based proceedings reinforce memory, affirm accountability as a legal value, and help prevent the normalization or erasure of atrocity as a matter of state policy.
II. Establishing a “Right to Truth” in Argentina
To understand why an Argentine court could later adjudicate a truth-based proceeding concerning the Armenian Genocide, it is first necessary to situate the Hairabedian case within Argentina’s own legal and institutional trajectory. The right to truth did not emerge in abstraction. It developed through decades of confrontation with enforced disappearance, impunity, and the limits of criminal accountability following the country’s last military dictatorship. This section traces how that domestic experience generated a legal framework capable of supporting truth-based adjudication beyond Argentina’s borders.
The 2000 Hairabedian case was made possible through collective action in the wake of Argentina’s military dictatorship. During the 1970s, in the context of the Cold War, Argentina became a central stage of state terrorism under Plan Cóndor a regional strategy supported by the United States Government to suppress leftist movements. Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983) deployed enforced disappearance as a systematic tool of repression, with an estimated 30,000 victims. This practice has been widely characterized, at the national level, as a form of state terrorism: an organized apparatus of violence based on secrecy, fear, and bureaucratic efficiency. In judicial terms, however, Argentine courts and international bodies have primarily framed these acts as crimes against humanity, reflecting their widespread and systematic nature under international law. At the same time, scholarly debate has persisted over whether certain patterns of repression in Argentina may also be understood as exhibiting genocidal characteristics.
Enforced disappearance, defined as the deprivation of liberty by state agents and a refusal to acknowledge the detention or to reveal the victim’s fate, placed individuals outside the protection of the law.1 Argentina’s 1985 Juntas Trial marked the first domestic prosecution of senior officials for such crimes, setting a global precedent for what would later be recognized as transitional justice. Yet, these prosecutions were soon curtailed by amnesty laws and presidential pardons, entrenching a framework of impunity.
Over the years, civil society organizations, most notably the Madres, H.I.J.O.S., SERPAJ, Familiares, CELS, and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo refused to accept the silence and the policies of forgiveness and forgetting imposed by the military regime and its supporters during Argentina’s post-atrocity impunity framework established in the initial phase of transition. Through sustained protest and strategic litigation, they engaged the Inter-American human rights system to obtain accountability when domestic courts proved unwilling or unable to act, exemplifying what the literature describes as the “boomerang effect” of transnational legal mobilization. By bringing cases before the Inter-American Commission and the Court of Human Rights, victims’ families internationalized their claims, prompting authoritative rulings that affirmed states’ duties to investigate serious human rights violations, to disclose the truth, and to remove legal obstacles to accountability.
This external jurisprudence, combined with broad and persistent domestic mobilization, reopened avenues for justice in Argentina after years of impunity. Over time, it also consolidated the right to truth as the legal principle that victims, their families, and society as a whole are entitled to know what happened in cases of grave human rights violations, even when criminal punishment is no longer possible. Argentine courts would later extend this principle to crimes committed during the dictatorship.
Argentina’s experience with enforced disappearance was not an isolated Cold War phenomenon but part of a longer genealogy of state violence. Courts later established the existence of more than 600 clandestine detention centers nationwide, where detainees were subjected to abduction, torture, and extermination, often through “death flights” over the Río de la Plata and the Atlantic Ocean. Across successive phases of Argentina’s transitional justice process, from the Juntas Trial to the Truth Trials, to the ESMA Megatrials, these practices were ultimately recognized as crimes against humanity.
In response to the legal barriers created by amnesty laws and presidential pardons, which foreclosed criminal prosecution while leaving victims without answers, victims’ organizations and segments of the Argentine judiciary developed an innovative mechanism: the Truth Trials. These sui generis proceedings did not seek criminal convictions. Instead, they preserved testimonial evidence, compelled state cooperation in fact-finding, and produced judicially validated records of past crimes, ensuring that enforced silence did not become an enduring substitute for justice.2 As Sevane Garibian has shown, they occupied a legal space between criminal prosecution and truth commissions, affirming the right to truth as an autonomous entitlement and laying the groundwork for the reopening of prosecutions in the early 2000s.
It is against this legal and institutional background that the Hairabedian case emerged. Although the court lacked jurisdiction to prosecute perpetrators, all of whom were dead, it examined historical evidence, reconstructed the facts, and recognized the family members as victims of genocide, offering official judicial acknowledgment long denied at the international level.
III. Conclusion
The Hairabedian case (2001–2011) extended the right to truth doctrine developed in Argentina’s response to enforced disappearances. Exercising universal jurisdiction, an Argentine federal court conducted a truth trial of the Armenian Genocide. Following the tragic death of Luisa Hairabedian, Gregorio Hairabedian’s daughter, head of the lawyers’ team of the trial in 2004, her family created the Fundación Luisa Hairabedian, which played a decisive role in sustaining and expanding the litigation. The Foundation coordinated the collection of survivor testimonies from the Armenian community in Argentina and facilitated the acquisition of archival evidence from Germany, France, the Vatican, Belgium, and the United States.3 In response to judicial requests, the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) produced extensive diplomatic archives documenting the systematic deportations and killings of Armenians and revealing explicit statements of intent by Ottoman authorities to eliminate the Armenian population. These documents corroborated core elements of genocide under Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention (killings, infliction of serious bodily and mental harm, deliberate creation of conditions of destruction, prevention of births, and forcible transfer of children) and provided compelling evidence of dolus specialis, as it was clarified in international jurisprudence of the ICTR and ICTY.
Crucially, the judgment did not purport to address the responsibility of the Turkish state, nor could it impose criminal sanctions or reparations. Its significance lies elsewhere. The decision demonstrates how domestic courts can function as sites of international norm articulation when traditional avenues of accountability are politically unavailable or legally foreclosed. By affirming the right to truth as an autonomous entitlement, the Argentine state generated an authoritative judicial record capable of supporting future legal, diplomatic, and reparative efforts. While the ruling does not bind Turkey in any way, it contributes to a growing body of transnational jurisprudence and evidentiary practice that may be invoked in civil litigation, legislative initiatives, or future negotiations.
More broadly, the Hairabedian proceedings illustrate how truth-based adjudication can travel across contexts of mass atrocity. A trial held in Argentina matters globally because it shows that accountability need not be confined to the territorial state or to criminal punishment alone. Domestic courts, supported by civil society and diaspora mobilization, can contribute to the global struggle against impunity by establishing truth, recognizing victims, and preserving evidence.
Today, the right to truth operates not only as a retrospective response to past atrocities but also as a preventive legal principle with contemporary relevance. In a moment marked by renewed patterns of mass violence, when disinformation, denialism, and the erosion of multilateral accountability mechanisms threaten hard-won human rights gains, truth-based judicial processes offer a durable framework for resisting impunity. By affirming victims’ legal status, preserving evidence, and anchoring historical facts in law, the right to truth helps ensure that mass violence and genocide are neither normalized nor erased. Its enduring value lies in this dual function: transforming memories of violence into enforceable legal truth, and equipping courts with the capacity to confront present and future atrocities before denial consolidates, accountability collapses, and silence is once again institutionalized as state policy.
Footnotes
1 Cf. International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance art. 2, Dec. 20, 2006, 2716 U.N.T.S. 3; Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court arts. 7(1)(i), 7(2)(i), July 17, 1998, 2187 U.N.T.S. 90; Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons art. II, June 9, 1994, O.A.S.T.S. No. 63, 33 I.L.M. 1529.
2 See Juan E. Méndez, Accountability for Past Abuses, 19 Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 255 (1997).
3 During her lifetime, Luisa Hairabedian had contacted Professor Alejandro Schneider, a historian affiliated with the Oral History Program at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), to collect oral testimonies of Armenian genocide survivors residing in Argentina using academic oral history methodology. This effort led to the formation of an interdisciplinary team of young scholars who compiled survivor testimonies. These materials were subsequently submitted as evidence in the truth trial, alongside international archival documentation. In addition, the court summoned members of the Armenian community (primarily survivors and descendants) to provide testimony during the proceedings.
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