Armenia urges UN top court to impose new interim orders on Azerbaijan for ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh
YEREVAN, October 12. /ARKA/. Armenia's representative on international legal issues Yeghishe Kirakosyan accused today Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh.
"Armenia had been warning for many months that Azerbaijan was preparing ethnic cleansing. On September 19, Azerbaijan launched a massive attack on Nagorno-Karabakh. Then, for the first time in 9 months of blockade, Baku cynically opened the Lachin corridor for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to leave the region where they have lived for centuries," Kirakosyan said at the UN Court hearing in The Hague on Armenia's application against Azerbaijan.
Kirakosyan said there are no Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh now. "And if this is not ethnic cleansing, then I don't know what can be considered ethnic cleansing,’ he said.
He said Azerbaijani representative will say that his country is ready for peace and so on. ‘But he said the same thing nine months ago. Then the blockade started. There was a brutal attack, because of which Armenians were forced out of the land of their ancestors," Kirakosyan said. According to him, Azerbaijan will definitely declare that it is ready for the return of Armenians, but Baku said the same thing after the 2020 war.
"Not a single Armenian was allowed to return to the occupied territories after 2020. Azerbaijan will promise to respect the rights and security of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh. But Baku voiced similar promises before. However, this did not prevent it from violating international conventions," Kirakosyan emphasized.
He stated that ethnic cleansing and attempts to erase the Armenian trace in the region, as it happened in Nakhijevan, can be stopped only if the interim measures of the International Court of Justice are applied.
“Nothing other than targeted and unequivocal provisional measures protecting the rights of ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will suffice to prevent the ethnic cleansing Azerbaijan is perpetrating from continuing and becoming irreversible,” Yeghishe Kirakosyan told the judges.
In a lawsuit filed with the UN Court on September 28, Armenia requests the application of provisional measures against Azerbaijan in order to realize the rights enshrined in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD).
The request contains a request to confirm Azerbaijan's obligations in accordance with the decisions already adopted by the court on December 7, 2021 and February 22, 2023 and to fulfill the list of 10 points-requirements.-0-
