European Court of Human Rights admits Armenia’s dishonesty - Azerbaijan

Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Elnur Mammadov has written that a recent decision made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has exposed Armenia’s position that it had no control or jurisdiction over previously occupied Azerbaijani territories.

“In the recent judgment delivered by the European Court of Human Rights [#ECHR] on October 17, 2023, [‘Case of Hovhannisyan and Karapetyan v. Armenia’], the Court noted that the citizens of the Republic of Armenia [R. Hovhannisyan and A. Sargsyan] were drafted into the Armenian army in 2009 and 2008 and were assigned to military unit no. 36534 of the ‘Nagorno-Karabakh armed forces’,” Caliber.Az reports, citing Mammadov’s message on X.

According to the message, in July 2010, they were both killed by their fellow servicemen as a result of an internal incident. The parents of the killed servicemen sued Armenia for compensation. The Court further noted that "it has already examined in other cases the issue of Armenia’s jurisdiction over the territory in question and found that Armenia exercised effective control over Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding territories and that, therefore, complaints pertaining to events that happened in that area came within the jurisdiction of Armenia for the purposes of Article 1 of the Convention (see Chiragov and Others v. Armenia [GC], no. 13216/05, §§ 169-86, ECHR 2015; Muradyan v. Armenia, no. 11275/07, §§ 123-27, 24 November 2016 and Nana Muradyan v. Armenia, no. 69517/11, §§ 86-92, April 5, 2022, specifically concerning the deaths of conscripts during compulsory military service in Nagorno-Karabakh; and compare Mirzoyan v. Armenia, no. 57129/10, § 56, 23 May 2019, concerning the murder of a conscript during compulsory military service in Nagorno-Karabakh)."

It had been a long-standing position of Armenia that it had no control or jurisdiction whatsoever over the then-occupied territories of Azerbaijan in order to deny its state responsibility for any wrongdoings committed therein. The ECHR concluded that Armenia was not honest. To put it diplomatically, the message says.