A special hearing was conducted in Paris on 13 – 16 April 1984 to investigate the Armenian Genocide . The Tribunal 's 35-member panel included three Nobel Prize winners — Seán MacBride , Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Professor George Wald — and ten eminent jurist , theologians , academics and political figures . The tribunal concluded that genocide was already prohibited by law at the time the Armenian Genocide took place - that though not explicitly banned by written rules it was not legally tolerated - thus the 1948 International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally expressing an already existing prohibition . The tribunal concluded that the massacres of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 revealed the intention of the systematic extermination of the Armenian people , intent as specified in article II of the 1948 convention , and that it was undoubtedly a genocide , the manifestation of a policy that had emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s . The tribunal criticized as unacceptable the denial ( '' il diniego abusive '' " the abusive refusal " ) of the genocide by Turkish governments since the establishment of the Kemalist republic
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Russell Tribunal