[1][3] Since there were no international laws in place under which they could be tried, the men who orchestrated the Armenian genocide escaped prosecution and traveled relatively freely throughout Germany, Italy, and Central Asia.
This principle later formed the legal framework of the 1946 Nuremburg Trials against German war criminals, and became enshrined in international law in the United Nations' Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of genocide.
The Allies insisting war crimes and partition of the empire being unified points quickly evaporated good will among the nationalists, which accused Paris of conflating two separate questions.
Among the effort's most ardent supporter: Damat Ferid Pasha, he rejected calls for collective responsibility, saying that "the innocent Turkish nation [was] free of the stain of injustice."
According to Taner Akçam, partition of the Ottoman Empire as a punishment for war crimes was a primary justification among the victorious powers for realizing imperialist ambitions in the Middle East.
[15] The commission of 15 presented their findings to the Council of 10 on 29 March, the powerful decision making body of the Paris Peace Conference, in a tense atmosphere due to increasing tensions between the victors.
Over the course of the Armistice Era British garrisons set out to arrest known war criminals that the Ottoman government did not cashier, and try them in ad hoc military courts.
Though Sultan Mehmed VI was largely supportive of the effort, he expressed his fear to his foreign minister of a reaction which could see him deposed or killed, hoping on Allied protection of his person.
After a reaction from the Ottoman government protesting against trying officers in foreign military courts for being contrary to previously established international law, Britain and France suspended arrest campaigns, resorting to presenting lists of suspects to the Sublime Porte.
[18] On March 5, Damat Ferid Pasha formed a government, and when presented with a list of alleged war criminals, had them arrested and detained in Ottoman prisons, and refused to hand them over to the British.
[21] At the same time the British Foreign Office conducted its own investigation into alleged war crimes, debating whether the process was adequately dealt with by Turkish courts martial.
The judges had conveniently condemned the first set of defendants (Enver, et al.) when they were safely out of the country, but now, with Turkish lives genuinely on the line, the Tribunal, despite making a great show of its efforts, had no intention of returning convictions.
[23] In August 1920, the proceedings were halted, and Admiral John de Robeck informed London of the futility of continuing the tribunal with the remark: "Its findings cannot be held of any account at all.
"[25] According to European Court of Human Rights judge Giovanni Bonello, "quite likely the British found the continental inquisitorial system of penal procedure used in Turkey repugnant to its own paths to criminal justice and doubted the propriety of relying on it".
Ottoman military members and high-ranking politicians convicted by the Turkish courts-martial were transferred from Constantinople prisons to the Crown Colony of Malta on board Princess Ena and HMS Benbow by the British forces, starting in 1919.
In its final report, completed on March 29, 1919, the commission on Responsibilities through Annex 1, table 2, identified thirteen Turkish categories of outrages liable to criminal prosecution.
[32] The Allied authority to proceed with any prosecutions was created as part of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, with the establishment of "The Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions", which was chaired by U.S Secretary of State Robert Lansing.
The commission's work saw several articles added to the Treaty of Sèvres to effect indictments against the acting heads of government of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Mehmed VI and Damat Ferid Pasha.
The Treaty of Sèvres gave recognition of the Democratic Republic of Armenia and developed a mechanism to bring to trial those accused of "barbarous and illegitimate methods of warfare... [including] offenses against the laws and customs of war and the principles of humanity".
[33] By 1921 the British High Commission had gathered a body of information from its Greek and Armenian sources about the Turkish prisoners held at Malta, and about 1000 others, all alleged to have been directly or indirectly guilty of participation in massacres.
[35] According to the former judge at the European Court of Human Rights Giovanni Bonello the suspension of prosecutions, the repatriation and release of Turkish detainees was amongst others a result of the lack of an appropriate legal framework with supranational jurisdiction, because following World War I no international norms for regulating war crimes existed, due to a legal vacuum in international law; therefore contrary to Turkish sources, no trials were ever held in Malta.
The staunch belief among members [of Parliament is] that one British prisoner is worth a shipload of Turks, and so the exchange was excused ...[38]Separate Turkish domestic prosecutions resulted in the convictions and sentencing to death of many of the masterminds of the Armenian genocide.
As many of the principal architects of the genocide had managed to escape prior to sentencing, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation decided at its 9th General Congress, which convened in Yerevan from September 27 to the end of October 1919, to pursue an assassination campaign against those it perceived to be responsible.
Mustafa Abdülhalik Renda, for instance, who had "work[ed] with great energy for the destruction of the Armenians",[39] later became the Turkish Minister of Finance and Speaker of the Assembly and, for one day, following the death of Kemal Atatürk, President.
[43][44] A leaked cable signed by David Arnett on July 4, 2004 at the Consulate General of the US in Istanbul states ambassador Birgi was effectively in charge of destroying evidence during the 1980s.