If the House of Lords also adopts the bill on the Armenian Genocide, it will become a law and will be legally binding for the government. This is what Director of the Bureau of the Armenian Cause and Political Affairs of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation-Dashnaktsutyun political party Kiro Manoyan said during a conversation with Armenian News-NEWS.am, touching upon the unanimous adoption by the House of Commons of the UK Parliament of the bill on the Armenian Genocide in the first reading.
The bill states that there shall be a formal recognition that the killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the surrounding regions during 1915-1923 were genocide, that there shall be an annual commemoration of victims of genocides, including the Armenian Genocide, and that it will encourage education and public understanding of the facts of the Armenian Genocide and the relevance of the Armenian Genocide to modern-day crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Asked if there are sufficient political grounds to predict that the bill will be fully adopted and will become law, Manoyan noted that even though it is hard to predict this, he called attention to the fact that a resolution with the same goals has been submitted to the legislature of Israel.
Consideration of the Armenian Genocide bill in the UK Parliament and unanimous adoption in the first reading is an interesting fact since this country has historically had special relations with Turkey, and there are no prima facie problems in the Turkish-British relations, at least at the level of the public.