August 10, 2007

Turkish Scholar Challenges Penal Code

By AISHA LABI

A scholar at the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies has filed a case with the European Court of Human Rights that he says is the first attempt to overturn through that legal channel a controversial provision of Turkey's penal code that criminalizes "denigrating Turkishness."

Taner Akçam, a Turkish sociologist and historian, has faced retribution in his home country for his academic work about the killing of as many as 1.5 million Armenians