On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government arrested and murdered hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople or modern-day Istanbul. The killing expanded into brutal massacres of the male Armenian population across Ottoman lands and the deportation of Armenian women, children, and the elderly into the Syrian Desert. More than one million Armenians were killed—roughly 70 percent of the total Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire. The wide-scale extermination and subsequent lack of accountability inspired Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to conceptualize the concept of genocide—a word he coined in 1944—and campaign for its criminalization.

In 1988, Armenia formally adopted April 24th as a public day of commemoration. Turkey strongly denies that the persecution was a genocide. To date, the governments of 29 countries have recognized the events of 1915 as genocide.