[4] Akçam's frequent participation in public debates on the legacy of the genocide have been compared to Theodor Adorno's role in postwar Germany.

[25] His fears materialized when he received a nine-year sentence in early 1977, which resulted in Amnesty International naming him as a prisoner of conscience.

[15] He served for a year before escaping from Ankara Central Prison on March 12, 1977,[14][17][25] using the leg of an iron stove to dig a hole.

[34] He received his PhD from Leibniz University Hannover with a dissertation titled, Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide: On the Background of the Military Tribunals in Istanbul between 1919 and 1922.

According to the Intelligence Report, the journal of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Dink's friend and ideological ally Taner Akçam, a distinguished Turkish historian and sociologist on the faculty of the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, attended Dink's funeral in Turkey, despite the considerable risk to his own life.

[4]In 2008, when Akçam's appointment as the chairman of Armenian genocide studies at Clark University was questioned by local Turks as biased, Deborah Dwork, director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark, said that "ethnic or religious identity is not crucial to any appointment," and that "they hire the best scholars in the pool".

[40] On 29 January 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron awarded Akçam the medal for courage for "denouncing denial" of the Armenian genocide.

[41] In January 2007, the Turkish government officially launched an investigation against Akçam regarding an October 6, 2006, newspaper column in the Turkish-Armenian journal Agos.

[47] Fearing reprisals after the assassination of Hrant Dink, Akçam entreated the Coordination Council of Armenian Organisations in France and president Sarkozy to pressure Ankara to protect him.

In explaining his detention, Taner Akçam says that Canadian authorities referred to an inaccurate version of his biography on Wikipedia from around December 24, 2006, which called him a terrorist.