Author: Vanyan Gary

To commemorate UN Human Rights Day (10 December) the EBU is making available a special concert by world-famous conductor Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra performed at the United Nations’ Headquarters in Geneva.

26 EBU Radio Members will air the concert entitled “For the Understanding of Civilisations and Human Rights” which was recorded on 31 October in the Human Rights Hall of the UN’s Palace of Nations in front of an audience including UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is made up of musicians from Israel and Palestine as well as other Arab countries and was formed to promote understanding, integration and reflection through music.

The concert programme comprises three symphonies composed by Mozart in 1788, three years before his death at the age of 36: Symphony Nº 39 in E flat major K.543, Symphony Nº 40 in G minor K. 550 and Symphony Nº 41 in C major K. 551, known as Jupiter Symphony.

The aim of the concert is to highlight, through music, the principles contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“We are thrilled to be able to distribute this meaningful concert,” said the EBU’s Head of Music Pascale Labrie. “Music stirs the soul and unites peoples so there is no better way to mark UN Human Rights Day than sharing this unique performance with audiences in 26 different EBU Member countries.”

On December 8, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic Karen Mirzoyan, who is on a working visit to the USA, had meetings with the representatives of the Armenian Assembly of America and the Armenian National Committee of America.

During the meetings issues of further expansion and development of cooperation between the NKR and the USA, the assistance provided by the United States to Artsakh, as well as the increasing number of provocations and violations on the Line of Contact by the Azerbaijan were discussed. The NKR Foreign Minister expressed satisfaction with the high level of cooperation with Armenian organizations in the US and stressed the importance of activities aimed at protecting the interests of Artsakh in the US.

After the meeting with the members of Armenian National Committee of America, the NKR Foreign Minister took part in a reception organized for the participants of the Pro-Artsakh Advocacy campaign, who had arrived in Washington for meetings in the US Congress and discussions with congressmen on issues related to Artsakh on the initiative of the Armenian National Committee of America. During the reception Karen Mirzoyan delivered a welcoming speech and answered numerous questions from the audience.

The same day the Minister of Foreign Affairs met with Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Ambassador James Warlick. A range of issues related to the current state of affairs in the negotiation process were discussed at the meeting. In particular, the sides emphasized the necessity of undertaking steps to exclude the violations of the cease-fire regime and reduce tension along the Line of Contact.The NKR Permanent Representative to the USA and Canada Robert Avetisyan accompanied the NKR Foreign Minister at the meetings.

Photo: Getty Images

 

Germany’s parliament is due to vote on whether the country should provide military support in the fight against Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria, the BBC reports.

MPs are expected to back the controversial plan.

Tornado reconnaissance aircraft, a naval frigate and 1,200 soldiers will then be sent to the region. But German forces will not engage in combat.

The vote comes after a French appeal following last month’s Paris attacks.

On Thursday, British warplanes carried out their first air strikes on IS targets in Syriaafter the country’s parliament authorised the military operation.

About 130 cases of ceasefire violation by the Azerbaijani side were registered at the line of contact between the armed forces of Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan over the weekend.

The rival used artillery weapons of different caliber and 60mm mortars as it fired more than 2,000 shots in the direction of the Armenian positions.

The front divisions of the NKR Defense Army keep control of the situation at the line of contact and confidently continue with their military duty, the NKR Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Inmates have lit fires at Australia’s Christmas Island detention centre in a “major disturbance” that is yet to be resolved, say government officials, the BBC reports.

The immigration department confirmed in a statement that guards had been withdrawn for “safety reasons”.

Medical, educational and sporting facilities have been damaged.

The statement denied a “large-scale riot” was taking place but said the situation at the centre for refugees and asylum seekers was “tense.”

The Christmas Island centre also houses New Zealanders facing deportation from Australia.

Azerbaijan’s ruling party has won parliamentary elections that were boycotted by the main opposition parties, the country’s electoral commission said, the BBC reports.

The ruling New Azerbaijan party won at least 70 seats in the 125-seat parliament, the commission said.

A host of small parties and candidates loyal to President Ilham Aliyev took almost all the rest.

The opposition has accused the government of jailing its opponents.

International monitors from the OSCE did not observe the vote, citing government restrictions.

More than a dozen political parties were vying for 125 seats in Azerbaijan’s National Assembly.

But analysts say those that could be considered genuine in their opposition to the government refused to participate.

“The pre-election period was marred by massive violations. That’s why we decided not to participate,” opposition Musavat Party leader Arif Gajily told Reuters news agency.

According to the BBC, Sunday’s vote serves as a reminder of the oppressive political environment inside the oil-rich nation.

In the past two years the Azeri authorities have jailed almost all critical voices, among them journalists, civil society activists, and human rights lawyers.

The government has also become increasingly intolerant of international criticism.

It denied the existence of any political prisoners, and it frequently describes negative publicity as a Western agenda to discredit Azerbaijan.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the leading international monitoring group, has not considered any of Azerbaijan’s elections since independence to be free and fair.

This year – for the first time in more than two decades – it chose not to send a mission, condemning the Azerbaijani government’s “crackdown on independent and critical voices”.

Two children aged 12 and 13 have been arrested on charges of “insulting the Turkish president” after allegedly tearing down posters showing a photo of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the reports.

The two cousins, identified only by the initials R.Y. and R.T., now each face up to two years and four months in prison, upon approval of the case by the Justice Ministry.

R.Y. and R.T., two cousins, were detained on May. 1 for tearing down the posters outside the local highway directorate in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir.

In his testimony, R.Y. reportedly said the two were heading back home from the market and they wanted to remove the posters from the billboards in order to sell them to a junk dealer.

“We did not care about whose posters they were. We just wanted to remove them in order to sell them to a junk dealer,” R.Y. said.

The Diyarbakir Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office applied to the Justice Ministry to file a lawsuit against the two children, as Article 299 of the Turkish Criminal Code (TCK) states that filing a legal case on charges of “defaming the Turkish president” must be done upon approval from the Justice Ministry.

After approval from the ministry, the case was filed against the two cousins in the Diyarbakir 1st Children Court.

The prosecutor’s office also asked for implementation of Article 5 of the Child Protection Law, which means counselling the family of the children in question, assuring their school attendance, and assuring their health conditions.

The first court hearing will be held on Dec. 8 this year, as the indictment prepared by the prosecutor’s office has been accepted by the Diyarbakir First Children’s Court.

The children’s lawyer, Ismail Korkmaz, said the charges of “insulting the Turkish president” were “unclear” and it was difficult for children to even know who the posters showed.

“It is devastating to see two children being tried for tearing down a poster of the president,” Korkmaz added, slamming Turkey’s “illiberal” justice system.

Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian will leave for Astana on October 15 to participate in the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of CIS participating states, Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports.

The Getty Museum will keep eight brilliantly illustrated table of contents pages from a 750-year-old Armenian Bible after settling a long-running lawsuit brought by an American branch of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the reports.

The church contended they had been illegally separated from the rest of the book amid the Armenian genocide during World War I.

The Getty and the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America jointly announced the settlement Monday. Both sides said they were happy with the outcome, but for very different reasons.

The Getty gets to keep the art, and the church gets recognition that all along it has been the rightful owner of the pages, which were separated about 100 years ago from a complete Bible called the Zeyt’un gospels.

The rest of the book is at the Matenadaran, a museum and library for manuscripts in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. The Getty bought its pages in 1994 from an Armenian American family for $1.5 million in today’s dollars.

Under the settlement, attorneys said, the church will donate the eight pages, known as a “canon table” that prefaces the rest of the Bible, to the Getty on Jan. 1, 2016. The Getty will pay all legal expenses from the suit the church had brought in 2010 – a sum attorneys for the two sides declined to disclose.

“It’s a resolution both sides are equally happy with, a win-win,” said Timothy Potts, director of the Getty Museum. “It’s an acknowledgment of their ownership, but maintains the work as an integral part of the collection here.”
Potts said that the Getty will keep custody of the manuscript pages until it officially takes ownership.

They were created during the mid-1200s by a renowned Armenian artist, T’oros Roslin, but were separated from the rest of the Zeyt’un Bible sometime during the upheaval caused by the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1918. It claimed the lives of about 1.2 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, which became the modern republic of Turkey. The Turkish government disputes that a genocide took place.

Lee Boyd, the attorney for the Armenian church, said its main objective was not to wrest the pages from the Getty, which it feels has been a good custodian and offers continuing access to a Southern California public that includes a large number of Armenian Americans.

The foremost goal, she said, was to set the historic record straight and draw attention to the fact that there is much unfinished legal business for heirs of Armenian families or institutions that lost property during the genocide.

“This is the first restitution of an artwork from the Armenian genocide,” Boyd said. “I hope it’s not the last. The case was brought to acknowledge the ownership of the church and [establish] recognition that they were taken during the Armenian genocide. It had devastating effects felt for generations, including much loss of cultural patrimony, particularly of the Armenian church.”

Before the settlement, according to court files, the church had sought the pages’ return, along with damages of at least $35 million. But both sides would have been on unpredictable legal terrain had the case proceeded, complicated by what Potts described as “lots of gray areas and facts we don’t know” relating to the manuscript pages’ whereabouts during and immediately after World War I.

According to court documents, the Zeyt’un Gospels were housed at a church in a traditionally Armenian area of what’s now Turkey. As chaos broke out, members of the Armenian community removed the prized Bible from the church for safe keeping. At some point the front pages with the most beautiful art were separated from the rest.

They wound up in possession of an Armenian man who immigrated to the United States in 1923, settling in Massachusetts. That family handed them down through generations until the Getty bought them more than 70 years later.

The pages became a highlight of the Getty’s collection of illuminated manuscripts. The materials – paint on vellum, a parchment made from calf’s skin — are too fragile and light-sensitive to be on permanent or frequent display, Potts said. But as delicate medieval manuscripts go, the Zeyt’un canon tables have been in heavy rotation, with one or more pages displayed in 11 exhibitions since 1997 – 10 at the Getty and one at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

They will have been out of view for 19 months when all eight pages go back on display Jan. 26 in the Getty’s exhibition “Traversing the Globe Through Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts.”

The church’s legal position got a boost in December 2013 from a ruling in another art-restitution case brought against a Spanish museum, involving California heirs of a family that lost a painting by Camille Pissarro during the Holocaust.

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to declare unconstitutional a special 2011 California law that extends the statute of limitations for claims to recover allegedly stolen works held by museums and art dealers. That took away some of the Getty’s legal ammunition.

But Boyd, the Armenian church’s attorney, said that pushing forward rather than settling the suit would have meant fighting additional procedural battles over whether the church had waited too long to sue.

In court documents the Getty had pointed to articles published in 1943 and 1952 that showed church officials were fully aware that the family in Massachusetts possessed the canon tables, and did not take action to get them back.

Also important to the settlement, Boyd said, was the knowledge that the Getty can give the artworks the best scholarly attention and technical care. “The Matenadaran has expanded its preservation abilities, but [Armenia] is still an emerging economy and the resources are not there as they are at the Getty,” she said. Boyd said “there are hopes this resolution will forge a relation between the Getty and the Armenian church” in which the Getty, which has an international program for art conservation, would take on projects in Armenia.

Potts said that “it could happen…but that hasn’t been a part of the [settlement] agreement.”

The museum director said another future possibility is a joint exhibition in which the Getty would loan its pages to the Matenadaran for an exhibition of the entire Zeyt’un gospels in Armenia, and in turn the full book would be shown at the Getty.

More likely in the near term, Potts said, is a ceremony to mark the church’s donation of the art to the museum.

“It’s an important moment for both parties, and we would love for there to be some such event,” he said.