WASHINGTON—The Obama Administration urged the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal of the Ninth Circuit’s 2012 decision striking down a California law extending the statute of limitations on Armenian Genocide-era life insurance claims, reported the Armenian National Committee of America.
“President Obama, rather than filing a brief based on the merits of this case, chose instead — on the eve of Prime Minister Erdogan’s visit to Washington, DC — to send Ankara a political gift by both deepening his administration’s complicity in the denial of the Armenian Genocide and also obstructing justice for American citizens seeking redress through the US courts,” said Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) Executive Director Aram Hamparian. “We will, despite the president’s retreat from principle, persevere in pursuit of the justice owed the Armenian nation.”
In a 27-page brief submitted to the Supreme Court last week, the US Solicitor General argues that the California law improperly allows courts “to issue judgments based on politically contentious events that occurred in the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago, with no substantial basis to claim that it is regulating in an area of its traditional authority.”
It also makes reference to selective Executive branch opposition to Armenian Genocide legislation, but not the US record of recognition of the Armenian Genocide as a crime of genocide, including:
1. The US government’s May 28, 1951 written statement to the International Court of Justice regarding the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in which the “Turkish massacres of Armenians” is cited among other “outstanding examples of the crime of genocide”
2. President Ronald Reagan’s April 22, 1981 Proclamation number 4838; in which he stated, in part, “like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians, which followed it — and like too many other persecutions of too many other people — the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.”
