Author: Hagop Kamalian

 10:00,

YEREVAN, APRIL 11, ARMENPRESS. The confirmation hearing of Deputy Prosecutor General Anahit Manasyan as the next Ombudsperson  will take place on April 11 in parliament.

Manasyan, unopposed, is nominated by the ruling Civil Contract party.

The opposition’s candidate, Edgar Ghazaryan, failed to pass a committee hearing ahead of the plenary.

The April 11 session agenda also includes debates on the prosecution’s motion asking permission to initiate criminal proceedings against Member of Parliament Mher Sahakyan for alleged assault.

 13:33, 4 April 2023

YEREVAN, APRIL 4, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s son Ashot Pashinyan on Tuesday denied reports that he’s been assaulted.

Speaker of Parliament Alen Simonyan on Monday said that Ashot Pashinyan has been assaulted. He didn’t elaborate.

Now, Ashot Pashinyan says that no assault has taken place.

“No political or any other type of assault against me has taken place. Regrettably, I have to deny the false reports about me myself. Regarding the “spread” of the information, I think what’s most surprising is who’s citing whom. And I don’t even care why. All the best to everyone,” Ashot Pashinyan said in a statement.

 01:47, 5 April 2023

YEREVAN, APRIL 5, ARMENPRESS. Azerbaijan violated on Tuesday an agreement reached with Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) and barred a group of Nagorno Karabakh Armenians – including children – from returning home after being stranded in Armenia due to the blockade of Lachin Corridor.

“27 civilians separated from their families for several months – including elderly, children and people with disabilities – were en route from Armenia’s Goris to Stepanakert on April 4, around 15:30, under an agreement with and accompanied by the Russian peacekeepers,” Nagorno Karabakh’s Ombudsman Gegham Stepanyan said in a statement. “Despite a previously reached agreement on the return, the Azerbaijani government agents posing as eco-activists in the blockaded section of the Goris-Stepanakert highway in the Shushi section barred the passage of the Russian peacekeepers’ vehicles carrying the civilians. This resulted in the citizens being stranded there for over five hours. The vehicles are now returning to Goris after ineffective negotiations between the Russian side and the Azerbaijanis.”

Some of the Azerbaijanis even entered one of the vehicles.

During that time, four civilians in the cars felt sick and three of them lost consciousness. The Russian peacekeepers took them to the Republican Medical Center in Stepanakert. The remaining 23 people are returning to Goris.

Stepanyan added that this incident once again proves  the Azerbaijani authorities’ “explicit and obvious” conduct of lying and misguiding the international community with its fake narrative claiming that there is no blockade.

“Furthermore, by allowing people to exit Artsakh in different ways, but banning entry, Azerbaijani authorities are explicitly carrying out ethnic cleansing, as Ilham Aliyev had admitted in his January 10 statement,” Stepanyan said.

He added that while hundreds of civilians in Goris are deprived of the opportunity to reunite with their families, Azerbaijan is exploiting the atmosphere of impunity and is not cooperating neither with the Russian peacekeepers, nor the ICRC or other international organizations over this issue.

Stepanyan added that the reason of Azerbaijan’s brazen behavior and disregard for the ICJ ruling and calls from the international community is the impunity, the disregard for the peacekeeping mission, and the absence of targeted and punitive measures by all international actors.

The United Nations’ highest court – the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – ordered Azerbaijan on February 22 to “take all steps at its disposal” to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions. The Lachin Corridor has been blocked by Azerbaijan since 12 December 2022.  Azerbaijan has been ignoring the ICJ ruling and multiple calls by the international community to open the corridor. 

Nagorno Karabakh healthcare authorities later reported that the four people – all women –  who were taken to the Stepanakert hospital after feeling sick and losing consciousness in the Lachin Corridor are in non-life threatening condition after receiving treatment. 

Update shows information from healthcare authorities.

 11:57,

YEREVAN, MARCH 31, ARMENPRESS. The Russian General Staff is not planning to hold a second wave of mobilization, because the current number of “volunteers and servicemen” is sufficient for fulfilling the tasks of the “special operation” in Ukraine, the head of the Russian General Staff’s main organization and mobilization department Rear Admiral Vladimir Tsimlyansky has said.

“I would like to assure you that the General Staff’s plans do not include the second wave of mobilization. The current number of conscripts and people who volunteered to participate in the [special] operation is sufficient for fulfilling the objectives,” TASS quoted Rear Admiral Tsimlyansky as saying during a briefing devoted to Russia’s spring conscription for mandatory service.

In his words, “the number of citizens who decided to join the Russian armed forces under the enlistment contract has increased significantly as of lately.”

This year’s spring conscription in Russia will be held during its usual timeframe of April 1 – July 15 for a total of 147,000 Russians aged between 18 and 27.

Meanwhile, Russian officials said that the conscripts called up for mandatory military service won’t be sent to Ukraine.

Russia mobilized 318,000 men in autumn 2022 for what it describes as “a special military operation” in Ukraine, which Kiev and many Western countries say is an unprovoked aggression.

 10:48,

STEPANAKERT, MARCH 30, ARMENPRESS. The Azerbaijani military has blocked the Goris-Stepanakert highway in between Aghavno and Tegh villages, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) said in a statement on Thursday.

It said that the new Tegh-Kornidzor (Syunik) track circumventing the closed road, which connects to the new Kornidzor-Hin Shen road (Lachin Corridor), is ready for use. The asphalt paving works in the Tegh-Kornidzor road are in process by Armenia.

The Tegh-Kornidzor road is functional and given the ongoing blockade of Artsakh can be used for the humanitarian supplies by Russian peacekeepers and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the authorities added.  The road is controlled by the Russian peacekeepers near the Hakari river bridge.

The Lachin Corridor has been blocked by Azerbaijan since 12 December 2022.

 18:27, 21 March 2023

YEREVAN, MARCH 21, ARMENPRESS. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Artsakh issued a statement about the right of self-determination of the people of Artsakh, noting that the authorities of Azerbaijan openly show that they reject negotiations with Artsakh as a means to resolving the conflict.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from MFA Artsakh, the statement reads as follows,

“For 100 days now, Azerbaijan has been subjecting Artsakh to an illegal blockade, the ultimate goal of which is to destroy the Artsakh people as such by expelling them from their historical homeland. Accompanying their actions with the use of force and acts of terror, Azerbaijan is pursuing a consistent policy aimed at forcibly suppressing the right of the people of Artsakh to self-determination. At the same time, the Azerbaijani authorities openly demonstrate their rejection of negotiations as a means of finding a solution to any issue.
 
It should be noted that for several decades, Azerbaijan has been striving to get rid of the people of Artsakh and resolve the Azerbaijan-Karabakh conflict by force. The first victims of such a criminal policy were, in particular, the Armenians who lived in Azerbaijan during the Soviet period. The deportation of Armenians from Azerbaijan organized by the local authorities in 1988-1990 and accompanied by massacres, torture and pogroms, marked the beginning of a new stage in Azerbaijan’s policy of persecuting Armenians. As early as in 1991, the Azerbaijani authorities continued the deportation of Armenians from Artsakh, which, in various forms and manifestations, has continued to this day.
 
Subsequently, in violation of international law and the UN Charter, and in an attempt to get rid of the people of Artsakh and suppress their right to freedom and self-determination, Azerbaijan has resorted to force three times to resolve the conflict through direct military aggression against Artsakh. All three wars waged by Azerbaijan against Artsakh were accompanied by massive human rights violations and war crimes, including wilful killings of civilians, extrajudicial executions and torture of prisoners of war and civilian hostages, indiscriminate shelling, the use of internationally prohibited ammunition, and deliberate attacks on critical civilian infrastructure.
 
As a result of the aggression against Artsakh in 2020 and the occupation of a vast part of its territory, more than 40 thousand Armenians of Artsakh became forcibly displaced. All civilians who remained in the territories that came under the control of Azerbaijan were brutally killed by Azerbaijani soldiers. Azerbaijan’s provocations and attacks on the civilians of Artsakh, including willful killings, continued even after the signing of the trilateral ceasefire statement of 9 November 2020.
 
Widespread and systematic violations of the rights of the people of Artsakh by Azerbaijan, including massacres, deportations, torture and other inhuman acts, are not only encouraged, but also co-ordinated at the state level. The Azerbaijani authorities do not even hide their criminal intentions to carry out ethnic cleansing and genocide in Artsakh. This is evidenced by the numerous public statements made by the President of Azerbaijan. The latest such statement was made on 18 March 2023, during his defiantly provocative visit  to the Armenian village of Talish occupied during the 44-day aggression, the entire population of which was forcibly displaced.  The visit itself, as well as the aggressive and belligerent statements of the Azerbaijani senior leadership during that visit, indicate that official Baku plans to extend the scenario implemented in the occupied village of Talish to the whole of Artsakh.
 
Along with this, throughout the entire negotiation process since the 1990s, Azerbaijan has sabotaged all efforts of the international mediators, in particular, the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairing countries, aimed at a peaceful settlement of the Azerbaijan-Karabakh conflict based on international law, each time refusing at the last moment from agreements on a compromise solution. Moreover, after the war of aggression in 2020, the Azerbaijani authorities refused altogether from the peace negotiations, declaring the issues of the life and rights of the people of Artsakh as their internal matter.
 
Azerbaijan’s deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing against the people of Artsakh indicates the need for the international community to reconsider their approaches to the issue of the status of Artsakh and the political settlement of the Azerbaijan-Karabakh conflict. The scale and gravity of the crimes committed by Azerbaijan at the state level against the people of Artsakh, as well as the ongoing genocidal policy, require decisive and urgent action by the international community, including the bodies responsible for maintaining international peace and security.
 
We believe that, at this stage, the development of additional legally binding obligations to resolve the conflict by peaceful means, the consolidation of the principles of non-use or threat of force and equal rights and self-determination of peoples as the basis for negotiations, as well as the restoration of the international mechanism for direct negotiations between Artsakh and Azerbaijan meet the requirements international law and the universal commitment to the protection of human rights around the world. Universal recognition of the Artsakh people’s inalienable right to self-determination is the most effective way in which the international community can guarantee the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms in Artsakh. 
 
We recall that according to international law and international practice, the denial and forceful suppression of the right to self-determination, accompanied by massive human rights violations, as well as the rejection of negotiations as a means of resolving conflict, are sufficient grounds for recognizing the right of a people to establish an independent state”.