The courts-martial were established on April 28 , 1919 while the Paris Peace Conference , 1919 was ongoing . An inquiry commission was established , called the " Mazhar Inquiry Commission " , which was invested with extraordinary powers of subpoena , arrest , et cetera , through which the war criminals were summoned to trial . This organization secured Ottoman documents from many provinces of the Ottoman Empire . Sultan Mehmet VI and Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha , as representatives of the Ottoman Empire during the Second Constitutional Era were summoned to the Paris Peace Conference . On 11 July 1919 , Damat Ferid Pasha officially confessed to massacres against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and was a key figure and initiator of the war crime trials held directly after World War I to condemn to death the chief perpetrators of the genocide
genocide
Armenian Genocide
Turkish courts-martial of 1919–1920