Azerbaijan Follows Up Appeal on Armenia’s War Crimes at International Court
GHRTV Reporter
10 – 11 - 2021
Alessandro Di Pietrantonio
International Justice and Human Rights Researcher,
Global Human Rights Defence.
Azerbaijani Prosecutor-General Kamran Aliyev has said that measures related to Azerbaijan’s appeal to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over Armenia’s war crimes are being taken. He underlined that the Prosecutor-General's Office has collected the necessary evidence about Armenia’s war crimes against Azerbaijan. The conflict started more than twenty years ago and concerns the control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region and by 1993, Armenia controlled the area and occupied 20 per cent of the surrounding Azerbaijani territory. Nagorno-Karabakh has been a frozen conflict for many years, but the violence escalated from 2016 until September 2020 when heavy fighting broke out along the border (Council on Foreign Relations, n.d.). Azerbaijani has been collecting evidence about Armenia-committed crimes since the occupation of the country's territories. International human rights organizations verified the use of banned cluster bombs and rockets by Armenia in its attacks against Azerbaijani cities.
A Moscow-brokered ceasefire deal that Baku and Yerevan signed on November 10, 2020, brought an end to six weeks of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani army declared a victory against the Armenian troops. The signed agreement obliged Armenia to withdraw its troops from the Azerbaijani lands that it has occupied since the early 1990s. The peace agreement urged Armenia to withdraw its troops from the Azerbaijani lands that it has occupied since the early 1990s. In September 2021 Armenia submitted a complaint to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Azerbaijan, alleging ethnic discrimination of Armenians in breach of Azerbaijan’s obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), to which Armenia and Azerbaijan are both parties and for this reason offers the possibility of judicial arbitration and the application of provisional measures (Eurasianet, 2021). Armenia alleges that Azerbaijan discriminated and persecuted Armenians through a variety of methods including hate speech, atrocities that are condoned and rewarded, a policy of ethnic cleansing, and the destruction of their cultural heritage. Azerbaijan responded that it would file a mirror complaint, with similar allegations, to the same court (Eurasianet, 2021)
Sources and further reading:
Azerbaijan follows up appeal on Armenia’s war crimes at int’l court, Azernews, 10 November 2021
https://www.azernews.az/nation/185105.html
Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict, Council on Foreign Relations,
https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/nagorno-karabakh-conflict
Will international law help resolve the Karabakh conflict?, Eurasianet, 23 September 2021
https://eurasianet.org/perspectives-will-international-law-help-resolve-the-karabakh-conflict
