By Ani Avetisyan
Armenia and Azerbaijan are engaged in a convoluted peace process in the Caucasus. But they are still tangled in a bitter fight in The Hague.
Over several days of hearings in mid-April, the United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ), based at the Dutch seat of government, weighed the merits of an Azerbaijani motion claiming the ICJ does not have jurisdiction over a three-year-old suit brought by Armenia. That suit demands that Azerbaijan face judgment for an array of war crimes, including fomenting hatred of Armenians that resulted in mass deaths and for systematically attempting to erase the vestiges of Armenian culture in Nagorno-Karabakh, which Baku reconquered last year. The takeover involved the mass expulsion of over 100,000 Karabakh Armenians from the territory.
In urging the court to proceed with the case, Armenia’s agent at the ICJ, Yeghishe Kirakosyan, characterized Azerbaijan’s aggression as racially motivated. “There is no better example of racial discrimination, upsetting peace and security, than Azerbaijan’s recent armed aggressions, which resulted in ethnic cleansing of all of Nagorno-Karabakh,” Kirakosyan said on April 16.
A day earlier, Azerbaijan sought a dismissal, arguing that the case fell outside the ICJ’s mandate, citing a technicality.
Shortly after Armenia filed its suit with the ICJ in 2021, Azerbaijan submitted a similar lawsuit against Yerevan. It may take years for these cases to play out at the ICJ. In the meantime, the court has issued several injunctions, including a ruling handed down last fall that Armenian refugees who had been cleansed from Karabakh had a right to return “in a safe, unimpeded and expeditious manner,” if they wished to do so.