Friday, July 7, 2023
France Wants Security Guarantees For Karabakh Armenians
Azerbaijan - French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna attends a joint news
conference with Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov in Baku, April 27,
2023.
A peace accord between Armenia and Azerbaijan must contain firm security
guarantees for Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population, French Foreign
Minister Catherine Colonna said late on Thursday.
Colonna and her Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan discussed ongoing
Armenian-Azerbaijani talks on such a treaty in a phone call.
“The Minister confirmed France’s full mobilization in support of the
negotiations under way between Armenia and Azerbaijan on all outstanding
issues,” the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement on the call.
“She emphasized that only an agreement that respects international law,
guaranteeing the opportunity for the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh to
continue living there with their rights and culture respected, could lead to a
just and lasting peace between the two countries,” added the statement.
Armenia maintains that such guarantees should be worked out through an
“international mechanism” for a dialogue between the Azerbaijani government and
Karabakh’s leadership. The Armenian Foreign Ministry said late last week that
Baku and Yerevan continue to disagree on this issue. Azerbaijani Foreign
Minister Jeyhun Bayramov said earlier that his government will not agree to any
special arrangements for the rights and security of the Karabakh Armenians.
In recent months, Baku has repeatedly accused France’s President Emmanuel Macron
and other officials of siding with Armenia in the conflict. Azerbaijani
President Ilham Aliyev charged on Monday that Paris is fomenting “Armenian
separatism” in Karabakh.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian rejected the Azerbaijani criticism and praised
France on Thursday, saying that he hopes more countries will follow its example.
“The [Azerbaijani] propaganda against France is aimed at preventing other
countries from adequately assessing the humanitarian crisis in
Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said.
Pashinian himself has been accused by his domestic political opponents of
jeopardizing Karabakh’s security with his recent pledge to recognize Azerbaijani
sovereignty over the region.
Minister Defends Ouster Of Outspoken Judge
• Narine Ghalechian
Armenia - Justice Minister Grigor Minasian, December 26, 2022.
Justice Minister Grigor Minasian on Friday defended his decision to initiate the
dismissal of a prominent judge who accused Armenia’s government and state
judicial watchdog of seeking to control courts.
The Armenian Ministry of Justice petitioned the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC)
last month to take disciplinary action against the judge, Davit Harutiunian,
after he claimed that the SJC arbitrarily fires his colleagues at the behest of
a single person. The state watchdog headed by Karen Andreasian, a political ally
of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, sacked Harutiunian on Monday.
Opposition figures and lawyers portrayed the move as further proof that
Pashinian’s government is seeking to further curb judicial independence in
Armenia under the guise of Western-backed “judicial reforms.”
“The Judicial Code stipulates that a judge has no right to criticize another
judicial body, which in this case was the Supreme Judicial Council,” Minasian
countered as he answered questions from Facebook users at the RFE/RL studio in
Yerevan.
“If a judge … has been fine and happy with the judicial system for 12 years and
started making statements only after disciplinary proceedings were launched
against him or his friend, I see a conflict of interest here,” he said, accusing
Harutiunian of “caring only about his own skin.”
Harutiunian’s ouster highlighted the Armenian authorities’ growing recourse to
punitive measures against judges. The practice was facilitated by a 2021 law
which Andreasian helped to enact in his previous capacity as justice minister.
The number of disciplinary proceedings against judges has risen sharply in the
last two years.
Last December, the SJC controversially fired a judge married to a vocal critic
of the government. Another Yerevan judge, Zaruhi Nakhshkarian, openly criticized
Anahit Pilosian’s sacking. Nakhshkarian lost her job as a result. Her removal
was also initiated by the Ministry of Justice.
Andreasian terminated his membership in Pashinian’s Civil Contract party shortly
before taking over as SJC chairman last October. Minasian succeeded him as
justice minister. The two men are close friends, according to some media
reports. They were spotted meeting at a café in Yerevan on June 23, after the
formal launch of the disciplinary proceedings against Harutiunian.
The SJC is a supposedly independent body that nominates judges, monitors their
work and can fire them.
Top Biden Aide Meets Armenian Official
U.S. - U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan speaks at a press briefing
at the White House in Washington, April 24, 2023.
U.S. President Joe Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, met with a
senior Armenian official in Washington late on Thursday for talks on regional
security and U.S.-Armenian relations.
“We discussed the security situation and challenges in the region and the wider
region,” Armen Grigorian, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, wrote on
Facebook on Friday. “In this context, I presented to my interlocutor the
Armenian side’s approaches to a number of important directions.”
In his words, bilateral ties were also on the agenda, with both men calling for
closer U.S.-Armenian cooperation on “energy, economy and democracy.” Grigorian
did not explicitly mention ongoing Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks or give
other details of the meeting.
Neither Sullivan nor his office issued a statement on the meeting that came one
week after the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers concluded a new round
of U.S.-mediated negotiations on an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. The
ministers held trilateral meetings in Washington with Sullivan and U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Blinken said on June 29 that despite “further progress” made by them “there
remains hard work to be done to try to reach a final agreement.” Armenian Prime
Minister Nikol Pashinian likewise noted on Thursday that the progress “not
significant.”
“Unfortunately, the text of the peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan is
not yet ready for signing,” Pashinian said.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry said on June 30 that the conflicting sides
continue to disagree on mechanisms for delimiting the Armenian-Azerbaijan border
and organizing a dialogue between Baku and Nagorno-Karabakh’s leadership.
The U.S. ambassador to Armenia, Kristina Kvien, on Thursday reaffirmed
Washington’s support for such dialogue. “The question of the rights and security
of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh is central to the conflict between Armenia
and Azerbaijan,” she said.
Captured Armenian Soldiers Sentenced In Azerbaijan
• Robert Zargarian
Azerbaijan - Armenian soldiers stand trial in Sumgait, July 5, 2023.
A court in Azerbaijan sentenced two Armenian soldiers to 11.5 years in prison on
Friday more than one month after they were captured by Azerbaijani forces in an
apparent cross-border incursion.
According to the Armenian Defense Ministry, the soldiers, Harutiun Hovagimian
and Karen Ghazarian, were ambushed and “kidnapped” on May 26 after delivering
water and food to Armenian army units guarding the border with Azerbaijan. The
ministry published photographs of their abandoned military truck found in a
wooded area in in Armenia’s southeastern Syunik province.
The Azerbaijani side claimed that Hovagimian and Ghazarian were taken prisoner
during a sabotage attack on an Azerbaijani army outpost. It brought a string of
criminal charges, including “terrorism,” against them. They were convicted of
these charges, strongly denied by Yerevan, at the end of a brief trial that
began on Monday.
Artak Zeynalian, a human rights lawyer representing the families of dozens of
other Armenian prisoners of war held in Azerbaijan, described the trial as a
“farce.” Zeynalian said the Azerbaijani military “kidnapped” Hovagimian and
Ghazarian in hopes of swapping them with two Azerbaijani soldiers who were
detained in Armenia in April.
Baku has repeatedly demanded the release of the Azerbaijani conscripts, saying
that they strayed into Armenian territory from the Nakhichevan exclave due to
heavy fog.
One of them, Huseyn Akhundov, was charged with murdering a Syunik resident one
day before his detention. An Armenian court sentenced Akhundov to 20 years in
prison on June 21.
The other Azerbaijani soldier, Agshin Bebirov, was given a 11.5-year prison
sentence in May. Both rulings were condemned by Baku.
Reposted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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