Geoffrey Robertson started his talk at the Responsibility 2015 conference in New York by telling the story of his great-uncle. William Robertson was an Australian soldier in the allied forces who in 1915 was sent to fight against the Ottoman army and, hardly twenty-four hours after disembarking at Gallipoli and joining his comrades in a charge on the cliff-top defences, was felled by a sniper or machine‐gunner.
Robertson drew an important lesson from this piece of family lore: the importance of distinguishing the killing of a soldier in war, and the annihilation of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman empire by the orders of their own state. The death of his uncle in the "Great War", as of millions of other soldiers, was tragic and painful, but there is no legal question over this outcome in that William and his comrades were "lawfully killed". By contrast, he added, the forced deportations and massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenian and other Christian civilians - including the elderly, women, and children, forced on death marches to the Syrian desert - is a crime against humanity, one that was never punished. This event needs to be remembered, Robertson insisted.
The choice of Robertson to deliver the opening speech at Responsibility 2015 - dedicated to the hundred-year anniversary of the genocide of the Armenians - is symbolically charged. The Australian-born lawyer, long based in London, has had a long career defending sensitive human-rights cases. In 2006 he was the judge heading the United Nations Special Court for Sierra Leone, which indicted former president Charles Taylor for war crimes. Most recently, he was part of the Armenian legal team (alongside Amal Clooney) in a case concerning denial of the genocide at the European Court of Human Rights in Brussels, as well as authoring a book on the Armenian genocide. Therefore, his presence symbolically bridged between the annihilation of Christian minorities in the Ottoman empire a hundred years ago, with current concerns about mass violations of human rights and crimes against humanity.
