The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled it is not a crime to deny mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey in 1915 was a "genocide" on Thursday.
Earlier this year, Amal Clooney, the human rights lawyer, took on the controversial case and was part of a team representing Armenia in a case in which a Turkish politician was convicted by Switzerland for denying the genocide in 1915 ever took place.
How did the Armenian genocide end up in the ECHR?
Doğu Perinçek, chairman of the Turkish Workers' Party, described the genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians - a fact Turkey disputes as well as the number of those killed - as an "international lie" in Switzerland in 2005.A lobby group called Switzerland-Armenia immediately filed a criminal complaint against him in July as it is against Swiss law to deny the genocide as part of the country's anti-racism laws.
Mr Perinçek was found guilty of racial discrimination in 2007 in Switzerland because "his motives were of a racist tendency", according to a later description of the case in an ECHR press release in 2013.
The Turkish national exhausted legal routes in Switzerland to appeal the judgment but his appeal was dismissed and in June 2008, he lodged an application to the ECHR complaining that his freedom of expression was breached.
The Turkish government also submitted written comments as a third party questioning the veracity of the genocide.
In December 2013, the ECHR agreed with Mr Perinçek and said his conviction was "unjustified".
Why was Amal Clooney representing Armenia?
Armenia challenged the ECHR's verdict and was represented in the case by lawyers from Doughty Street Chambers in London.For many Armenians, the genocide, like the Holocaust of six million Jews, is still a painful issue exacerbated by Turkey's continued denials. In the Perinçek case, Armenia hoped to set out that the genocide is a fact which cannot be denied without legal repercussions.
What happened in 1915?
In the last years of the Ottoman Empire, ethnic divisions became a bigger problem for those in charge and the Armenians were viewed with suspicion.Turkish historian, Taner Akçam, in his book, A Shameful Act, explained how non-Muslim communities were organised in a millet system of limited self-government. Although the Ottomans ruled, certain groups along religious and ethnic lines had limited control over their own affairs.
In 1908, junior army officers - referred to as the Young Turks and Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP) - seized power from Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and the country underwent a process of what many historians call "Turkification". This nationalism was intended to bring all cultures together but in 1914, "the Young Turks began a campaign to portray the Armenians as a kind of fifth column," according to John Kifner in the New York Times.
It is generally accepted by many, including historians such as Ara Sarafian, an Armenian historian, that the start of the massacres was April 24, 1915. This was the date on which several hundred Armenian individuals were arrested and killed and led to further massacres across Turkey.
The map below shows the areas where massacres took place - the larger the circle, the greater the number of those killed.
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