We Must Fight for the Rights of Artsakh Armenians to Return: Exclusive interview with Luis Moreno Ocampo

Interview by Matías Raubian

Today, Luis Moreno Ocampo is a name recognized by Armenians worldwide. He has been one of the most important voices in defense of the Armenian population of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). Moreno Ocampo is part of a campaign to denounce Azerbaijan’s crimes ahead of the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, spreading awareness across social media and bringing a ray of hope to those who feel defeated and powerless after the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh in 2023.

Moreno Ocampo’s resume is impressive. Apart from being the first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, he was the Deputy Prosecutor in the Trial of the Juntas that judged the military personnel who led a bloody dictatorship in Argentina. In 2022, a film about this story was released (Argentina, 1985) that spotlights Moreno Ocampo along with former Argentine-Armenian judge Leon Carlos Arslanian. This was the most important trial in the country’s history, starting what Harvard professor Katryn Sikkink labeled a “global justice cascade.”

Moreno Ocampo sat down with the Weekly for an extensive interview about his career, life, interest in Armenian issues and future prospects of the COP29 campaign.

Matías Raubian (M.R.): Why did you decide to study law and specialize in the defense of human rights?

Luis Moreno Ocampo (L.M.O.): My mother’s family are military people. My grandfather was a general who studied in Prussia in 1907. My other grandfather was a politician, a senator representing a liberal party, and the women were very feminist. A great-great-aunt of mine was a teacher, educated by one of the 62 American teachers who worked in Argentina following an educational plan of President Sarmiento. My family had very contradictory aspects, and I learned to appreciate differences. I decided to study law in 1966. There was a coup d’état, and my father, who was rather liberal, would argue with my uncles, who were colonels and had nothing to do with the coup but were military men.

M.R.: Tell us about your years at university during the dictatorship.

L.M.O.: I started at university in 1970. I entered during a dictatorship. I went through democracy, and I left during another dictatorship, so I went through different times. My professor of criminal law who influenced me a lot, Enrique Bacigalupo, held a high position during the time of President Héctor José Cámpora. Then he went into exile and ended up as a judge of the Spanish Supreme Court. I think education is very important, because in Argentina I saw the influence of a Spanish professor named Luis Jiménez de Asúa, who was a professor in Madrid. When Miguel Primo de Rivera came to power in Spain, Jiménez de Asúa said, “You can’t teach law under a dictatorship” and resigned. When Primo de Rivera left, Jiménez de Asúa returned to teaching, became a member of parliament in Spain and even worked on writing the Spanish constitution. When Francisco Franco came to power, Jiménez de Asúa escaped, arrived in Buenos Aires and became a professor of criminal law. In 1966, there was a coup d’état in Argentina. Jiménez de Asúa was already 76 years old and said again, “You can’t teach law under a dictatorship.” He resigned and died in 1970, being exiled from Spain and from the University of Buenos Aires, which felt like his home. I never met him, but I remember in 1980, at a recognition ceremony, there were other Spanish exiles who praised him. It was a tragedy, a poor man who taught law and freedom dying in a double exile.

In 1985, during the Trial of the Juntas, four of the six judges were his students. The prosecutor Julio César Strassera was his student, presidential advisors Jaime Malamud and Carlos Nino were, too, and I had been a student of a student of his. The secretary of CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) and the writer who wrote the report were also his students. Fifteen years after his death, Jiménez de Asúa triumphed. I always think about that. When you go through harsh times, you have to understand that it could be different in the long term. Jiménez de Asúa taught me the importance of teaching.

In 1980, I was teaching at university, and one of my professors invited me to join the Attorney General’s Office of the Nation. When democracy returned, I was offered a position as Vice Director of the Research Institute of the Faculty of Law. When the judges decided that the military junta should be tried, they did something very strange. In Argentina, investigations were normally carried out by the police with investigative judges. In the junta case, the Military Justice Code was applied, which meant that a quick summary trial was held, and the judges decided that the Prosecutor’s Office would carry out the investigation. So the prosecutor, Julo Strassera, who did not have a team, had to put one together for the investigation.

The film (Argentina, 1985) shows that Argentina had a problem: the judiciary was full of people who agreed with the military or were afraid of facing them. So, Strassera finally proposed it to me, who had never in my life conducted a criminal trial. Thus, at 31 years old, I became the Deputy Prosecutor responsible for investigating the massive crimes committed by the dictatorship.

M.R.: At that time, were you aware of the danger you were in?

L.M.O.: When Julio offered me the position, I had to think about the consequences. I considered that I would not be killed under democracy, and I would have to escape if there was a new coup d’état. I could not refuse. Every morning when I started my car, I left the door open, because I had read that if a bomb exploded under your car, the impact on your legs was less if the door was open. So, we were aware, but it was like we didn’t care. We had to do it. We were aware of the importance of the trial.

M.R.: How did you experience the Trial of the Juntas?

L.M.O.: I had to investigate in four months the mass deaths throughout the country, organize the information, and then I was in the courtroom for six months interviewing the witnesses. That transformed my mind. I had studied criminal law, not investigation. There was also the communicational impact of this type of trial. As the film showed, my mother loved the main defendant, General Jorge Rafael Videla. She was unhappy with me. My uncle, a colonel, was devastated. He went to see General Videla and said, “Ocampo is my nephew. I can’t stop him. I promise you that I will never speak to him again.” He fulfilled his promise and never spoke to me again. He was strict and loyal; I loved him, even if he didn’t speak to me.

M.R.: How is your relationship with Carlos Arslanian?

L.M.O.: He was a judge. I was not in contact with him, but sometimes there were meetings where we had to ask him for things. Carlos is a very well-educated person, but with a survival instinct that makes him different. Carlos was very different from the rest of the judges. For him, investigating mass crimes was also a vindication of what had happened to his family.

Arslanian led the way; he realized that the trial, in addition to complying with all procedural guarantees, had to be very fast to avoid an adverse political situation. He was a great leader and had full control of the courtroom. Carlos Arslanian’s father arrived in Argentina at the age of 22, without family here, or even speaking Spanish. He survived the Genocide of 1915 and left two little brothers in an orphanage in Syria, Aleppo. Within four years, he managed to gather enough funds to return to Aleppo to search for his brothers. For Carlos, what happened to the Armenians marked his life, and that is why he studied law.

I admire him. He has impressive creativity and talent. I respect him a lot because, in addition to being the judge who presided over the trial, he later became Minister of Justice, enacting judicial reform, and then he was Minister of Security of Buenos Aires twice, so he is a person who made enormous efforts. Along the way, he also did very well as a lawyer.

M.R.: How did your career continue after the Trial of the Juntas?

L.M.O.: When the trials were over, I stayed for four more years, because I believed that we had to move forward against corruption. I was also a prosecutor in cases of military rebellions in Argentina. Once we finished with that, I opened a law firm and for 10 years I dedicated myself to private practice. I went back to teaching, and Harvard and Stanford University offered me positions as a visiting professor.

M.R.: How was that transition to the private sector after such an important experience making history in Argentina?

L.M.O.: I didn’t want to make money defending the same people I prosecuted, and I decided that I was going to be a lawyer for good causes. It turned out that it was a very good market, because nobody was doing that. It just so happened that I left the Attorney General’s office when Argentina privatized public companies. They had a lot of corruption, so I became the person who had corruption control programs for public companies. I was first contacted by Telecom, a telephone company, and then they all hired me. I put together a firm that had investigators, sociologists, and it went very well. Corruption became my topic. I was a member of Transparency International, a global NGO, and I taught courses on corruption. Stanford and Harvard invited me for that reason.

At the end of 2002, I got a call from the Jordanian Embassy in New York. The ambassador had the responsibility of looking for a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), and my name had appeared at the top, but they didn’t know if I wanted that position. My name had been suggested in 1993 to be the first prosecutor of the Yugoslavia court. The Security Council agreed, but the president of Argentina, Carlos Menem, refused. He didn’t want me, because I investigated corruption. I was not interested.

But when they offered me the position at the ICC in 2003, it was different. I had always thought that the Trial of the Juntas was my biggest professional achievement. I would never do something bigger. So, I took the liberty of doing everything. I worked for big companies, for human rights, I went to Harvard and I did a television program solving small cases as an arbiter that was a success. In the end, the Trial of the Juntas was my training. I went to the ICC, where I worked for nine years. I started with the ICC in a very conflictual situation with the United States, which attacked us a lot. Even the judges thought that we would close in three months, and we ended up as a stable and respected institution. My task was to put it into operation.

M.R.: Tell us about your work at the ICC — not only your investigative work, but also the creation of this institution.

L.M.O.: It was fascinating. I started with two officers and one assistant and ended with more than 300 people from 92 countries with different professions. It was like an orchestra with musicians from various genres — rock, jazz from New Orleans, African songs and classical from Vienna and Germany. People from all over the world with diverse experiences were brought together to play in harmony. It was a fascinating mess. I was an orchestra conductor. I had to choose the people, define the music we were going to play and the policies we were going to implement, but start playing quickly, because there were 18 judges waiting for my case. And that’s what we did. Just managing those professionals with so much experience was fascinating. I was also involved in 17 of the biggest crimes in the world, from Palestine to genocide in Darfur, Iraq and Afghanistan.

M.R.: After your departure, how do you see the institution and the general situation of the trial of international crimes?

L.M.O.: I felt that I had done my homework, and it is true that the court is already set up and it works. But it is not enough. While the idea of international justice was being established, there was also a paradigm of resolving conflicts through war. At the same time, and this is fascinating, the ICC exists, which was not the case in 1915, and it acts. It prosecuted Vladimir Putin. Karim Khan, the current ICC Prosecutor, requested an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. The world is witnessing the fight between war and justice.

M.R.: Do you think that these institutions can deal with geopolitical conflicts and wars?

L.M.O.: It cannot be just a matter of the judges. It has to be a matter of society, political leaders and everyone. That is why the Armenian case is very important, because Armenia is not fighting. There was no war in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023. There was a group of Armenians who were first besieged by hunger and then thrown out by fear. Those are two forms of genocide. It is not a genocide like the one in 1915. It does not have the number of deaths, but it is still a genocide. Everyone knows it, and everyone plays dumb not to say it. The United States avoids violating its genocide obligations by denying that there are genocides. Samantha Power wrote this in her book, A Problem from Hell, but it keeps happening, and it happened to her herself. When she went to Armenia, she could not mention the word genocide. That is why the case of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh is so important, not only because of what happened to the 120,000 Armenians, not only because of the risk to Armenia itself, but also the risk to the world.

León Carlos Arslanian, Juan Gabriel Tokatlian and Mario Nalpatian asked me to get involved in the issue. That is how I started. But it is good to feel that there is a global community like Armenians in the diaspora that has a very strong interest in this. The Armenian community understands that genocide is something that must be avoided. They are hurt, because the defeat in Nagorno-Karabakh was a big blow to them, but they need to recover.

M.R.: How did you get involved in the issue?

L.M.O.: In June 2023, Mario Nalpatian called me to ask what I could do for Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh. I studied the issue and saw that there was a ruling by the International Court of Justice that said that the blockade would cause the deaths of 120,000 Armenians. It is an ethnic group. Without saying that it was a genocide, because the case of Azerbaijan was not about genocide, the International Court of Justice was saying that there was a genocide. It seemed incredible to me that there could be a second genocide against the Armenians. It was a scandal of such proportions that it had to be stopped. It was crazy.

I prepared a report in August 2023; the media took it up, and it was published. The U.S. Congress reacted and called me to a hearing. At that time, I thought that we were going to achieve something. On September 19, the Armenian community published a full page in the New York Times telling President Joe Biden to speak at the United Nations General Assembly and prevent the Armenian genocide. Biden spoke on September 19 at the General Assembly and did not mention Armenia or Nagorno-Karabakh. That same day, Azerbaijan bombed Nagorno-Karabakh, and a week later, the entire Armenian population was removed from Nagorno-Karabakh. The genocide was consummated.

M.R.: What did you feel when you published the first report and when you were summoned to the U.S. Congress?

L.M.O.: The report was taken up by many Armenians who helped make it public. We managed to get attention, Congress summoned me, I testified and then the Senate the following week called the Assistant Secretary of State for the Caucasus. It seemed like there was a moment of change, but we arrived late. Countries like the United States and everyone agreed that Nagorno-Karabakh was a region of Azerbaijan, and nothing could be done then, ignoring the genocide. We arrived late unfortunately, which does not mean that we should stop fighting. Whether you win or lose, you have to keep fighting the next day. Armenians know that. The fight is not over.

At the Senate meeting, Ambassador Yuri Kim promised that the U.S. would not accept something like what happened. We have to be firmer, and the United States has to do more than what it is doing.

Now, when Azerbaijan wants to hold this meeting on climate change, it creates an important opportunity to bring up the issue. It cannot happen that there is a meeting on climate change in Azerbaijan, in Baku, and what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh is not discussed by delegates. If the Nagorno-Karabakh genocide is not discussed at COP29, Armenia will be next. Aliyev does not hide his intentions to conquer Armenia. If Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh is not discussed in Baku at COP29, in December we will have problems in the border areas of Armenia again. We now have a kind of truce that we should take advantage of.

M.R.: You have emphasized that this military aggression by Azerbaijan has parliamentary support.

L.M.O.: There is a decision by the Azerbaijani parliament that says that Armenia does not exist, it is Western Azerbaijan. It is mind-blowing. That is why what Judge Gassia Apkarian did is very important. She submitted documentation to the International Criminal Court on April 18 showing that the genocide was not only in Nagorno-Karabakh, but that there is also a similar genocide in Armenian areas with cities that were surrounded and emptied. This is happening now in Armenia and could happen in the future — precisely what the congress of Azerbaijan warned and Aliyev said. I believe that Armenia itself will be better defended, because Europe and the United States accept that Armenia is a sovereign country. But nothing will prevent Azerbaijan from fighting on the borders, taking cities and advancing. We must stop them and not allow them to advance.

M.R.: You spent most of your life investigating genocides. Now there is a historic opportunity to stop one. While ethnic cleansing in Artsakh could not be stopped, the aggression against Armenia can be stopped. How do you feel about that?

L.M.O.: It seems to me that since there is an Armenian diaspora, there is a possibility of doing much more than in cases like Ethiopia, where nobody cares about the Tigrans, or the Rohingya in Myanmar. It seems to me that the Armenian diaspora could have a very strong impact if we can organize it.

M.R.: How do you see the campaign you are carrying out on social media?

L.M.O.: It is not my campaign. I am helping Armenian activists. It was their idea to generate common hashtags in English, allowing people to express their opinions in any language, but as a part of the same group. #COP29 allows every person who comes to the conference to see this. Then we have #StopGreenwashGenocide and #FreeArmenianHostages. Hostages is the form used by the Armenian community in Germany. The family of Ruben Vardanyan proposed “prisoners,” but we used the German formula, which I also think is correct and stronger. The idea is that every Armenian individual around the world could dedicate just a minute to posting a comment with these hashtags. That will generate a collectivity, an important community. Above all, we need people from the United States, because the algorithms are basically defined by the movement of Twitter/X in the United States.

The plan we have is to mobilize the Armenians in August, then include the people who work on climate change and target the delegates who are going to Baku. There are two ideas: there are people who want a boycott, but it has to be a very strong stance, and it has to be known that they are not going because there are people who committed genocide. If they go, they have to ask to see the prisoners. There are 23 people today in Baku who are Armenian and are imprisoned because they are Armenian. They did not commit any crime. There is no judge in Azerbaijan who can free them. Fighting for the 23 Armenians imprisoned today is fighting for Nagorno-Karabakh and for Armenia.

In Azerbaijan, there are no independent judges. I am not the one saying that. The U.S. State Department report on human rights says that people could be killed and tortured in Azerbaijan prisons and that there are no independent judges. It is not that we can ask for a fair trial. There is zero chance that a judge can tell Aliyev to release these people. That is not going to happen. The prisoners are victims of genocide. I say that they are hostages, because they are imprisoned to send a message to Armenians that if they come to Nagorno-Karabakh, they will be imprisoned or killed. In addition, it is repeating the history of 1915, which began by putting the Armenian elite first in prisons, and then they were executed. History is repeating itself.

M.R.: What do you think about the right to return of the population of Artsakh?

L.M.O.: Of course, we must fight for the right to return. We must not hand over Nagorno-Karabakh. The first step now is to release the prisoners during COP29. The next step is to take care of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, so that they can return or have their rights recognized. This problem cannot be ignored. But if COP29 passes without mentioning Nagorno-Karabakh, the prisoners will remain imprisoned, and the people will never be able to return to Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh. That is why it is a very important fight now. I think that the least we can ask the delegates is that they demand information about the prisoners and go to the prisons in Baku to see the Armenian prisoners.

There will be journalists or ambassadors who are not afraid. It depends on how isolated they feel. The idea of launching this campaign on social networks is to start spreading the word. We need to make sure that it will be a shame to go to Baku and not speak about the hostages. That is what we have to achieve. We do not need heroes in Baku. It should be a shame to be in Baku and ignore the Armenian issue. The Azerbaijanis are very good at using geopolitical advantages and money to deny the genocide. Everyone knows that a genocide was committed against the people of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh, and nobody talks about the genocide. Since the 107th anniversary, President Biden has talked about the 1915 Genocide, but did not mention the 2023 genocide. We have to change that.