Azerbaijan to take Armenia to international court soon

Baku has said that Azerbaijan will take Armenia to international court in the coming days.

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Leyla Abdullayeva made the remarks to comment on the latest state of international legal cases against Armenia.

"In the coming days, in addition to the proceedings instituted by Azerbaijan against Armenia with the ECHR in January this year, Azerbaijan will bring legal proceedings to hold Armenia to account for systematic violations of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD)," the spokesperson said.

Abdullayeva stressed that after Azerbaijan ensured that Armenia ends the illegal occupation of Azerbaijani territories, the country has "been carefully collecting and documenting evidence of gross human rights violations against Azerbaijanis".

She said that this includes Armenia’s targeting of Azerbaijanis for the expulsion, torture, murder and serious mistreatment based on their ethnic origin as Azerbaijanis.

Moreover, the spokesperson noted that over one million Azerbaijanis were forcibly expelled from their homes, and Azerbaijani cities have been completely razed to the ground as a result of Armenian aggression.

Abdullayeva emphasized that after the signing of the trilateral statement, Armenia continued to violate the ICERD by preventing Azerbaijani IDPs from returning to their homes through indiscriminate mining of the formerly occupied territories and refusing to provide mine maps to Azerbaijan.

“We will not tolerate these grave breaches of ICERD by Armenia and will be seeking justice under international law as soon as possible," she said.

Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Elnur Mammadov said on his Twitter account that "30 years of human rights abuses against Azerbaijanis during the occupation will not be tolerated".

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.

However, Armenia deliberately and constantly planted mines on Azerbaijani territories, in violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention, thereby being a major threat to regional peace, security and cooperation.

Some 160 Azerbaijanis have been killed or injured in the explosion of mines planted by Armenians in Azerbaijan’s formerly occupied regions since the end of the war in autumn 2020.

On June 12, Azerbaijan handed over 15 Armenian prisoners in exchange for a map detailing the location of 97,000 mines in formerly occupied Aghdam.

On July 3, Armenia submitted to Azerbaijan maps of about 92,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines planted during the occupation of Fuzuli and Zangilan regions.