Tehcir Law
Ottoman government adopts the Temporary Law of Deportation
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The four-article law used to legalise the Armenian deportations never uses the word "Armenian" — and the machinery was already moving before it existed.
27 May 1915: four articles
An Ottoman provisional law dated 27 May 1915 gave army-corps and division commanders, their deputies and fortified-post commanders sweeping authority to suppress armed resistance and remove populations on grounds of military necessity, espionage or treason.
The official text ran to four articles and made War Minister İsmail Enver responsible for its implementation.
Armenian deportations were already under way when the CUP government sought this broad wartime statutory authority.
What the text does not say
The law did not name Armenians or prescribe Deir ez-Zor as a destination. It supplied general legal authority that was used principally in the already-begun deportation of Armenians.
Property confiscation was implemented through additional directives, commissions and the later Abandoned Properties legislation, not by these four articles.
Exemptions later applied to particular groups came from separate administrative instructions.
Adopted on the 27th, in force from 1 June
The measure was not published and brought into force until 1 June, in the official gazette Takvîm-i Vekâyi, so calling 27 May its date of promulgation is imprecise.
Scholarship distinguishes among proposal, adoption, cabinet approval — sometimes placed on 30 May — and publication; 27 May is defensible as the law's stated adoption date.
On 3 June the US ambassador Henry Morgenthau reported that the new law empowered military authorities to expel populations whenever they considered it necessary.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes Date disputed
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The official text bears the date 27 May and was published on 1 June, but scholarship distinguishes among proposal, adoption, cabinet approval—sometimes placed on 30 May—and publication. Thus 27 May is defensible as the law's stated adoption date, not as its publication date.
- The law's neutral wording and its actual use against Armenians must be distinguished. It did not itself name an ethnicity or a single destination.