Armenia asks World Court to Pursue Ethnic Cleansing Case against Azerbaijan

He continued, “Thus, this conflict is not an ordinary inter-state war, contrary to what, in a perfectly contradictory and decontextualised manner, Azerbaijan is trying to convince you by claiming that within this conflict there are particularly cruel and shocking acts of violence which have nothing to do with the ethnic origin of their victims.

“This conflict is an ethnic conflict because for three decades, under the pretext of territorial integrity, Azerbaijan refused to accept the self-determination of the Armenians living on their ancestral lands in Nagorno-Karabakh. This conflict was-and still is-ethnically motivated and discriminatory, just as Azerbaijan’s decision to put an end to this self-determination through its military operations in 2020 and, ultimately, in September 2023, was ethnically motivated and discriminatory. What Azerbaijan, through the voice of its President, calls its ‘war of liberation,’ or its ‘patriotic war,’ involved numerous discriminatory violations of the fundamental rights of ethnic Armenians, including when they took part in the hostilities. Moreover, this war resulted in the complete ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh in defiance of the court’s orders, which were intended to protect plausible Convention rights that were under serious threat.

“According to its own national narrative, Azerbaijan thus ‘liberated’ itself by waging war at the end of 2020, and then — after a complete ceasefire — by pursuing its objectives through the gradual strangulation of Nagorno-Karabakh, right up to the final coup de force in September 2023 by which the ethnic Armenian inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh were driven out. Thus, for Azerbaijan, its ‘liberation’ involved the rejection of any autonomy for ethnic Armenians and, ultimately, their forced exclusion from their ancestral lands, which is consolidated by the denial, destruction or alteration of any trace of the centuries-old Armenian presence in this territory. This, ladies and gentlemen of the court, is the objective and the fruit of Azerbaijan’s ‘patriotic war:’ a homeland without ethnic Armenians,” the law professor remarked.