Azerbaijan, Armenia speed up creation of Joint Border Commission

The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia held the next phone talks on Monday to discuss the process of preparations for the border delimitation and signing a peace treaty.

The Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan reported that Jeyhun Bayramov and his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan exchanged of views as a follow-up to the agreements reached at the level of the leaders of both states.

They have ultimately agreed on parameters of the participants of a Joint Border Commission tasked to start the process of delimitation and demarcation of the Armenia-Azerbaijan state border.

“It was agreed to convene the meetings of the Joint Border Commission, as well as the Working Group on preparation of a peace treaty, in the near future,” Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a statement.  

Baku and Yerevan agreed on the establishment of a joint commission in a meeting hosted by European Council Charles Michel in Brussels on April 6.

In March, Azerbaijan submitted Armenia a proposal package containing five basic principles that would help normalize bilateral relations after nearly three decades of stalemate. President Ilham Aliyev has earlier said that the Armenian authorities accepted the principles put forward by Baku.

Azerbaijan has been calling for delimiting its borderline with Armenia since 2020, when the two countries fought a bloody war in the Karabakh region over 44 days. The war ended in complete victory of the Azerbaijan Armed Forces, which liberated more than 300 settlements from Armenia’s occupation.

The control over a larger portion of Azerbaijan’s 1,007-kilometer borderline with Armenia returned under the country’s control in the wake of the war. Amidst regular border provocations, with the last committed by the Armenian forces on April 23, 2022, Baku has been demanding immediate delimitation and demarcation of the border as one of the priorities of normalizing the relationship with Armenia.