The Armenian public has not yet heard the Council of Europe's resolutions condemning Azerbaijan on the 44-day war in 2020, Armen Gevorgyan, an MP from the opposition Armenia bloc said.
His remarks came at a meeting with Council of Europe Secretary General Marija Pejčinović Burić in the parliament.
Here is Armen Gevorgyan's statement in full:
“Madam Secretary General:
Welcome to Armenia. It’s rather unfortunate that you don’t have a separate meeting with the representatives of the parliamentary opposition. It is becoming a bad tradition when representatives of the Council of Europe avoid direct dialogue and engagement with the mainstream political opposition in Armenia. Nevertheless, I would like to focus your attention on a number of important issues.
The domestic socio-political life in Armenia has reached its boiling point, because a great injustice is being enforced against the people of Nagorno Karabakh. I believe in the course of your meetings with the Armenian officials you have often heard about a certain “agenda of peace” for the region. Let me reiterate, that no one in Armenia wants another war. But there is a much greater number of people who do not accept that after thirty years of free and independent state-building the people of Nagorno Karabakh can live as part of Azerbaijan. The people of Nagorno Karabakh are against that too. We are greatly concerned that, for example, in contrast to the European Parliament, we observe the Council of Europe’s determination to put a sign of equality between Armenia and Azerbaijan, aspiring to be “less annoying” for Azerbaijan and Turkey with critical resolutions and assessments of their policies. By the way, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that by avoiding direct dialogue with mainstream opposition forces both in Armenia and Azerbaijan you, in essence, indirectly put another sign of equality between these two countries in terms of their democratic credentials.
The Armenian public has so far not seen any relevant resolutions about Azerbaijan’s launching of the unprovoked and unjustified war against Armenians in 2020. The Council of Europe has failed to adopt sanctions following the acts of aggression by Azerbaijan against the territorial integrity of Armenia since May 2021. Azerbaijan continues to ignore the calls of the international community to free all prisoners of war and other detainees, and still carries out its racist and xenophobic policies and propaganda against Armenians. I presume, this will also be testified by the International Court of Justice in the relevant proceedings currently underway. All these are major points of concern, essentially questioning whether we at all can agree with Azerbaijan on anything.
You may well ask: what can the Council of Europe do to resolve the Nagorno Karabakh conflict fairly? I am convinced that first and foremost our Organisation must begin by objective assessments of the situation, which I believe will be a good deterrence against Azerbaijan’s aggressive aspirations, but also will protect the quality of democratic governance in the Council of Europe Member States. This will also contribute to any future dialogue for peace in the region.
Our Organisation must be fair and consistent in supporting the protection of fundamental human rights and freedoms, and first and foremost in terms of upholding the right of peoples to self-determination.
Madam Secretary General:
At the same time, we are deeply concerned that the Council of Europe has been disregarding the clear backsliding from norms and traditions of democracy in our country. The restrictions of the freedom of speech and freedom of the media, the growing dependence of the judiciary and the investigative bodies on the executive branch, the illegal persecutions of opposition figures have become “new normal” of the so-called democratic traditions in Armenia. The disputable quality of the elections to the local self-governance bodies held in the past few months is impossible to disregard even by the international organisations.
Over the past two months this long list of such unacceptable phenomena has been supplemented by violations of the rights of citizens to peaceful protests, as well as by the use of brutal and disproportionate force by the police against protesters. On June 3 the police used stun grenades to disperse the multi-thousand opposition rally, without due warning and without necessity, and as a result many policemen and protesters were seriously wounded and taken to hospitals. Currently 31 opposition figures are arrested on various illegal grounds and with obvious political motivations.
I would like to remind everyone here that in the Spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly a resolution on genuine democracy has been adopted, which stated, I quote, that “democracy is not the dictatorship of the majority”.
In conclusion, I would like to add that we do not intend to make the Council of Europe a space for gladiator fights against either Armenian authorities or Azerbaijan. But we neither intend to put up with the facts that our Organisation is being transformed into a platform of legitimising the consequences of the 44-day war; into a platform clearly promoting the interests of the Turkic coalition led by Turkey and Azerbaijan at the expense of the Armenian people; or a space silently observing anti-democratic processes in our country.”
