YEREVAN (RFE/RL) — While Armenia considers the latest five-point proposal by Azerbaijan for starting peace talks to be acceptable, it still believes that it fails to fully address the possible peace agenda, the country’s foreign minister has said.
“Ultimately, there is nothing inadmissible in Azerbaijan’s proposal that was passed to Yerevan on March 10 except that these issues do not fully address the possible agenda of comprehensive peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and our answers were aimed at completing that agenda,” Ararat Mirzoyan said in the National Assembly on Monday, March 21.
Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said on March 14 that it had applied to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group co-chairs (the United States, Russia and France) requesting that they organize Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations on a peace treaty “on the basis of the UN Charter, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Helsinki Final Act. “
It followed a statement by Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov that Baku had submitted a five-point proposal to Yerevan to normalize relations.
Baku insists that a future peace treaty with Yerevan should be based on five fundamental principles, including mutual recognition of each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual reaffirmation of the absence of territorial claims to each other and a legally binding obligation not to make such claims in the future, abstaining from threatening each other’s security, delimitation and demarcation of the border with the establishment of diplomatic relations and unblocking of transport links.
“We consider the rights of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and the addressing of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh to be key and fundamental. We are ready to start negotiations on this complete basis and it is with this proposal that we applied to the OSCE Minsk Group, “the minister said, answering questions of lawmakers.
