Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Germany Tuesday 1:06 PM EST European court orders Armenia, Azerbaijan to compensate war refugees Paris DPA POLITICS justice Europe Armenia Azerbaijan conflict European court orders Armenia, Azerbaijan to compensate war refugees Paris Armenia and Azerbaijan must compensate seven refugees from the former Soviet republics' war for the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Tuesday. Armenia must pay 5,000 euros (almost 6,000 dollars) plus costs to each of six Azerbaijani Kurds who have been unable to return to an area occupied by Armenian forces since the war in the early 1990s, the court said. Azerbaijan, in a separate judgement, was ordered to pay 5,000 euros and costs to the children of an Armenian man who had been unable to return to his village in the Shahumyan region, near Nagorno-Karabakh. The court had already ruled in 2015 that Armenia had given no valid reason to explain why the six Azerbaijani applicants were not allowed to return to their homes in the Lachin district in Nagorno-Karabakh. Also in 2015, the court held that Azerbaijani authorities had been within their rights to keep the Armenian applicant's village off limits for security reasons, but should have compensated him. Christian ethnic Armenian forces have controlled the former autonomous district of Nagorno-Karabakh, inside majority-Muslim Azerbaijan, since a 1994 ceasefire ended several years of fighting. They also control formerly Azeri-populated areas around the enclave, including Lachin. The conflict, as well as simultaneous ethnic clashes inside Armenia and Azerbaijan, caused hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee in both directions across the countries' border. The court said that both countries had a responsibility to find a political solution to the conflict, which briefly flared up again last year in fighting that killed more than 120 people.