{ just lies }
During his trial in Berlin in 1921, Soghomon Tehlirian gave a detailed and emotionally charged account of witnessing the murder of his family during the Armenian Genocide. This testimony deeply affected the court and the public. Historically, however, it is known that Tehlirian was not present in the region at the time his family was murdered. His statement was, in this sense, a lie—or more precisely, a constructed narrative that departed from factual accuracy while conveying a different kind of truth.
As a conceptual approach Just Lies proposes lies, half-truths, silences, and omissions as methodological tools for engaging with histories of mass violence, complicity, and failed justice. Instead of treating the lie as the opposite of truth, this approach considers how untruths operate within legal, political, and historical frameworks, and what they reveal about the limits of law as a mechanism for justice.
Following the lies as well as twisted and omitted facts in the Tehlirian Trial, the Istanbul Trials, contemporary legal cases concerning the Genocide in Gaza, and the debates preceding the Genocide Convention allows for a comparative reading of how the liberal legal order repeatedly deferred, displaced, or reconfigured notions of justice. In the Istanbul Trials for instance, genocide was formally acknowledged yet left without enforcement. Talaat Pascha, despite being sentenced to death, was aided by Germany in fleeing and lived in Berlin under a different identity. In contemporary Palestine-related trials, legal argumentation once again centers on procedural boundaries that prevent substantive engagement with material responsibility and complicity. By tracing these distortions and absences across different legal moments, the concept of Just Lies asks whether the lie is truly the primary opponent of justice. In the Tehlirian Trial, a lie contributed to an outcome that many experienced as more just than the alternatives available within the law.
At the same time, more powerful and enduring untruths—those that protect states, obscure structural violence, and reduce genocide to individual acts—remain legally normalised. As a conceptual lens, Just Lies foregrounds the tension between legal truth and justice. It opens a space to think about how justice could emerge through narrative fractures and the exposure of what liberal law is unable or unwilling to articulate.
