ArmInfo.The leadership of Azerbaijan will comply with the judicial acts adopted by the ECHR and the International Court of Justice of the Hague only in the event of a threat of application and the very application of political sanctions. An expert in the field of international law, lawyer Ara Ghazaryan, expressed a similar opinion to ArmInfo.
"Legal processes in these courts against Azerbaijan in order to return Armenian prisoners of war to their homeland are ongoing. The ECHR and the Hague court have already adopted interim decisions. However, as a rule, their implementation requires a lot of time, which is often measured even in years. It is impossible to do it without legal processes, but it also makes no sense to pin hopes for the return of our guys exclusively with them," he stressed.
According to official data, 38 Armenian servicemen are still being held in Azerbaijani captivity. However, according to human rights activists, in reality their number is much higher. Azerbaijan, however, hides the real number of illegally detained Armenian citizens.
Meanwhile, the lawyer believes that from a military-political point of view, the process of returning Armenian citizens held captive by Azerbaijan has reached a dead end. First of all, due to the fact that Baku uses the issue of prisoners of war as a political lever to extract concessions from Yerevan. According to Ghazaryan, Baku can be forced to retreat from this position only by international sanctions. Since in the conditions of their absence, Azerbaijan has considerable opportunities for maneuvering in order to avoid the return of Armenian prisoners of war.
At the same time, the lawyer noted that, if the judges of the ECHR or the Hague Court would be willing they may well force Baku to return the Armenian prisoners to their homeland. According to him, this may take place if the courts not only record in their verdict the fact of a violation of human rights, in this case, the rights of Armenian prisoners of war by Azerbaijan, but also instruct this violation to be immediately eliminated. Ghazaryan noted that international courts take such steps very rarely.
"One way or another, the trials of Armenian prisoners in Baku are false from the legal point of view and fabricated from beginning to end. If only because they are accompanied by numerous violations of human rights. The very fact of the absence of a public trial already calls into question the entire legitimacy of trials against our guys. Not to mention everything else. But Azerbaijan continues to break this tragicomedy, using, among other things, its own political resources. Thus, the effectiveness of legal processes in the cases of our prisoners of war largely depends on political processes," Ghazaryan summed up.