Biography and career
Yeghiayan was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to a wealthy Armenian family originally from the Ottoman Empire. His father Boghos, a native of Isparta, was an orphaned survivor of the World War I-era massacres and deportations of the Armenian genocide. [2] In Ethiopia, Boghos had worked his way up at an international trading firm. Yeghiayan's mother, Aroussiag Terzian, had close relations with the Ethiopian royal family – her godmother was Menen Asfaw, the wife of Emperor Haile Selassie – and this relationship had afforded him and his two brothers the privilege to study abroad. [2] At age eleven, he was sent to an American boarding school in Cyprus and in 1954 he arrived to study in the United States. [3] He attended school at Indiana University for one year before being accepted to Berkeley, initially as a premed student, later changing his major and graduating with a Bachelor in history in 1959. Yeghiayan was accepted to the University of California, Hastings College of the Law and completed his legal studies at Lincoln Law School, receiving his Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 1965. After briefly working for a small firm in Oakland, he joined California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA). [2]
Over time, Yeghiayan rose from junior attorney to become the Northern California Regional Director of the CRLA. Due to his experience, in 1974 President Richard Nixon appointed him as the Special Assistant for International Operations to Director of ACTION. [3] He was later appointed assistant director to the Peace Corps and remained in this position until 1980. Yeghiayan was made responsible for the establishment and management in formulating policy, agency planning, conducting liaison with foreign and domestic governmental and private organizations and individuals, and encouragement of voluntary service programs within the United States and abroad. As Assistant Director, he supervised the worldwide operations of the Peace Corps' 7,000 volunteers in over 60 countries. He was re-appointed by successive administrations and served under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter. Yeghiayan also served as Secretary for the United States Presidential Commission on Volunteerism. [3]
In 1975, Yeghiayan testified before the United States Congress Helsinki Commission and in 1979, he was commissioned by the American Enterprise Institute of Public Policy, to write a position paper on the Horn of Africa, leading Yeghiayan to serve as consultant on the topic of starvation in Africa. Following his career in Washington D.C., Yeghiayan opened his own legal practice in California. In 1991, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, he visited the newly formed Republic of Armenia and served as a legal advisor there and authored the first draft of the Armenian Constitution. During the same year, Yeghiayan pioneered efforts to bring food assistance to the newly formed republic through USAID, and he led a team of engineers from the Ministry of Engineering in California to conduct a feasibility study of the oil industry in Armenia. [3]
In 1989, Yeghiayan’s spouse, Rita Mahdessian, was admitted to the practice of law in California. [4] The two formed a law firm, Yeghiayan & Associates, in Glendale, California.
The partners were charged with misappropriating $385,000 intended for Armenian genocide survivors and related charitable organizations, and faced disbarment proceedings. [5] The partners were also sued, in 2011, by their co-counsel, Brian S. Kabateck and Mark Geragos, for misappropriation of funds; in turn, Yeghiayan counter-sued Kabateck and Geragos, filing similar charges. The matter was later submitted for arbitration. [4] A year after Yeghiayan's death; in November 2018, Mahdessian was absolved of embezzling funds, but found to have "committed acts of moral turpitude by both (1) misappropriating $30,000 from the nonprofit, and (2) engaging in tax fraud by falsely reporting this and another $26,000 in taxable payouts to her children and their law school as donations or loan repayments... Considering Mahdessian’s three prior disciplinary suspensions, the hearing judge recommended disbarment." [6] Though suspended from September 2017 to June 2018; Mahdessian was able to retain her license to practice law. [7]
Class action lawsuits
In 1987, Yeghiayan came across a passage in the memoirs of Henry Morgenthau Sr., the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, describing an exchange between him and Mehmed Talat Pasha, the man chiefly held responsible for the Armenian Genocide. [9] The text in question spoke of Talat's and, by extension, the state's interest in claiming as beneficiaries the life insurance policies of the Armenians who had perished during the genocide. [10] The Armenians had purchased these policies from New York Life and Equitable Life of New York prior to the beginning of the war and, after exploring the issue more in depth, Yeghiayan came to the conclusion that New York Life, as well as other insurance companies, had withheld death benefits totaling in the tens of millions from the descendants of the deceased. [11] [12]
After gathering evidence and finding several descendants of the victims, in 1999 he filed a class action lawsuit against New York Life in a case which lasted for four years. In January 2004, New York Life agreed to pay $20 million to settle the lawsuit. [13] The California state insurance commissioner appointed a committee of prominent Los Angeles Armenians to vet applications for settlement money, [14] with the committee ultimately approving claims from the descendants of 2,400 Armenian Genocide victims. [15] The settlement also included $3 million earmarked for nine Armenian church and charity groups. [15] In 2015, Yeghiayan donated over 40 boxes of documents from the New York Life Insurance Company class action lawsuit to the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. [15]
Yeghiayan also filed additional suits against other insurance companies, including AXA (with co-counsel Brian Kabateck and Mark Geragos), which agreed to settle in 2005 by paying $17.5 million, and Deutsche Bank. [16] He has given lectures in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Canada, and Armenia on the legal ramifications of the class lawsuits regarding the Armenian Genocide and restitution of Armenian properties. [3] [17]
In September 2008, Yeghiayan filed suit against the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States, seeking documents from 1914 to 1925 relating to the Armenian Genocide, following the administrations failed response to his repeated request to procure information. In June 2010, Yeghiayan filed on behalf of the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Church suit against the J. Paul Getty Museum for the return of eight thirteenth-century Armenian illuminated manuscript folios, the work of Armenian manuscript illuminator Toros Roslin, the first such case in the United States that the return of cultural or religious objects stolen during the Armenian Genocide. In September 2015 both parties reached an agreement whereby legal title of the folios would be returned to the Church while the pages themselves would remain in the possession of the Getty. [18]
In December 2010, a suit was filed against the Turkish government and two Turkish banks, the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey and Ziraat Bankası, for seized Armenian assets in the region of Adana. [19] In March 2011, Yeghiayan filed suit against the United States Federal Reserve on behalf of the Center for Armenian Remembrance, to demand the disclosure of information pertaining to Armenian assets and confiscated gold, which was seized by the Ottomans during the Armenian Genocide.
Disbarment, also known as striking off, is the removal of a lawyer from a bar association or the practice of law, thus revoking their law license or admission to practice law. Disbarment is usually a punishment for unethical or criminal conduct but may also be imposed for incompetence or incapacity. Procedures vary depending on the law society; temporary disbarment may be called suspension.
Edward Davis (Ed) Fagan is a former American reparations lawyer who was disbarred for his conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.
Mark John Geragos is an American criminal defense lawyer and the managing partner of Geragos & Geragos, in Los Angeles.
Soghomon Tehlirian was an Armenian revolutionary and soldier who assassinated Talaat Pasha, the former Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, in Berlin on March 15, 1921. He was entrusted to carry out the assassination after having earlier killed Harutian Mgrditichian, who had worked for the Ottoman secret police and helped compile the list of Armenian intellectuals who were deported on April 24, 1915.
The deportation of Armenian intellectuals is conventionally held to mark the beginning of the Armenian genocide. Leaders of the Armenian community in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, and later other locations, were arrested and moved to two holding centers near Angora. The order to do so was given by Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha on 24 April 1915. On that night, the first wave of 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople were arrested. With the adoption of the Tehcir Law on 29 May 1915, these detainees were later relocated within the Ottoman Empire; most of them were ultimately killed. More than 80, such as Vrtanes Papazian, Aram Andonian, and Komitas, survived.
Samuel A. Weems was an Armenian genocide denialist, the writer of the book Armenia: The Secrets of a "Christian" Terrorist State, and a disbarred lawyer from Hazen, Arkansas.
Screamers is a 2006 documentary film directed by Carla Garapedian, conceived by Peter McAlevey and Garapedian and produced by McAlevey. The film explores why genocides have occurred in modern day history and features talks from Serj Tankian, lead vocalist of the American alternative metal band System of a Down, whose grandfather is an Armenian genocide survivor, as well as from human-rights activist, journalist, and professor, Samantha Power, as well as various other people involved with genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. Screamers also examines genocide denial in current-day Turkey, and the neutral trend that the United States generally holds towards genocide.
The Armenian Genocide Martyrs Monument, better known as Montebello Genocide Memorial, is a monument in Montebello, California in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, dedicated to the victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915. The monument, opened in April 1968, is a tower of eight arches supported on 75-foot-tall (23 m) white concrete columns. The memorial was designed by Hrant Agbabian. It is the oldest and largest memorial in the United States dedicated to the Armenian Genocide victims. The inscription on the memorial plaque reads:
Armenian Martyrs Memorial Monument: This Monument erected by Americans of Armenian descent, is dedicated to the 1,500,000 Armenian victims of the Genocide perpetrated by the Turkish Government, 1915–1921, and to men of all nations who have fallen victim to crimes against humanity.
Thomas Vincent Girardi is a former attorney and co-founder of the now-defunct Girardi & Keese, a downtown Los Angeles law firm. He was disbarred in 2022 after accusations of defrauding clients. He is separated from his third wife, the performer Erika Jayne, with whom he occasionally appeared on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in their Pasadena mansion.
Bruce Fein is an American lawyer who specializes in constitutional and international law. Fein has written numerous articles on constitutional issues for The Washington Times, Slate.com, The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Legal Times, and is active on civil liberties issues. He has worked for the American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation, both conservative think tanks, as an analyst and commentator.
Paul Mpande Ngobeni is a South African lawyer who graduated from Hamilton College, New York. He has served on a task team advising the African National Congress on constitutional law matters where he assisted in designing its legal strategy for defending South African President Jacob Zuma against corruption charges. He has also served as a consultant for the South African Ministry of Housing on various legal matters, including transformation.
The issue of Armenian genocide reparations derives from the Armenian genocide of 1915 committed by the Ottoman Empire. Such reparations might be of financial, estate or territorial nature, and could cover individual or collective claims as well as those by Armenia. The majority of scholars of international law agree that Turkey is the successor state or continuation of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, the Republic of Turkey continued the Ottoman Empire's internationally wrongful acts against Armenians, such as confiscation of Armenian properties and massacres. Former Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee, Professor Alfred de Zayas, Geneva School of Diplomacy, stated that "[b]ecause of the continuing character of the crime of genocide in factual and legal terms, the remedy of restitution has not been foreclosed by the passage of time".
Behbud Khan Javanshir was an Azerbaijani politician, diplomat, Minister of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry.
Misak Torlakian was the assassin of Behbud Khan Javanshir, former Minister of Interior of Azerbaijan, in 1921. Torlakian was admitted "guilty but not responsible" due to his mental condition by a British military tribunal in October 1921.
The confiscation of Armenian properties by the Ottoman and Turkish governments involved seizure of the assets, properties and land of the country's Armenian community. Starting with the Hamidian massacres and peaking during the Armenian genocide, the confiscation of the Armenian property lasted continuously until 1974. Much of the confiscations during the Armenian genocide were made after the Armenians were deported into the Syrian Desert with the government declaring their goods and assets left behind as "abandoned". Virtually all properties owned by Armenians living in their ancestral homeland in Western Armenia were confiscated and later distributed among the local Muslim population.
Oscar S. Heizer was an American diplomat who served in various posts as Consul General in the Ottoman Empire. Heizer, who was the Consul General in Trebizond during World War I, witnessed the Armenian genocide and often risked his own life to save the lives of Armenians.
Levon Marashlian is an American historian, professor, and scholar. His scholarly work has largely focused on Armenian, Russian, and Middle-Eastern history. He has participated in various debates, lectures, and conferences throughout the world. He is currently a professor of history at Glendale Community College.
Gourgen Mkrtich Yanikian was an Armenian genocide survivor. He is best known for the assassination of two Turkish consular officials, Consul General Mehmet Baydar and Consul Bahadır Demir. The event took place in Santa Barbara, California in 1973.
Bibliography of the Armenian genocide is a list of books about the Armenian genocide:
