Author: Talar Tumanian

From left, Armenia’s Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan and attorney representing Armenia at the European Court of Human Rights Siranush Sahakyan and Artak Zeynalyan

After a video surfaced in which Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan is heard making untrue statements regarding Armenian prisoners of war, Armenia’s Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan and attorney representing Armenia at the European Court of Human Rights Siranush Sahakyan and Artak Zeynalyan issued a joint announcement warning Simonyan and other high-ranking officials to not invoke sensitive information about captives to further their personal agendas.

Simonyan came under fire and faced calls for his resignation on Tuesday after the video emerged where the Parliament Speaker can be seen and heard saying that many Armenian POWs captured during Azerbaijan’s attempt to invade Armenia on November 16 “put down their weapons and ran away” during fighting with Azerbaijani forces.

He also claimed that their relatives had not protested because they realize that the soldiers were deserters. Hundreds of relatives of captured Armenian soldiers staged a demonstration on Wednesday in front of the parliament calling for Simonyan’s resignation for the comments, which the speaker claims were edited out of context.

“If I’m going to lose Syunik, Sisian because of those POWs … sorry, I may be wrong, but I believe those POWs don’t exist anymore,” Simonyan was recorded as saying.

The human rights advocates’ statement on Wednesday focused on the same conversation, which was was secretly filmed as Simonayn spoke with several members of France’s Armenian community during a recent visit to Paris. Tatoyan, Sahakyan and Zeynalyan voiced concern that Simonyan had cited untrue examples attributed to a repot they issued in August detailing torture and inhumane treatment of Armenian POWs by their Azerbaijani captives.

For example, Simonyan is heard saying that the report documented that POWs were raped in captivity, while the report, entitled “Azerbaijan’s Responsibility for Torturing Armenian Prisoners and Subjecting them to Inhumane Treatment,” did not contain any such data or even the word “rape.” The human rights leaders also contend that the report did not contain any personal data, among them photos or videos of individual POWs, as claimed by Simonyan.

“The Joint Special Public Report highlights the patterns and general forms of torture that, as a rule, have typically been used against Armenian captives in the Republic of Azerbaijan,” the three human rights advocates said in their announcement on Wednesday. “At the same time, the Joint Special Public Report states that the forms and means of violence against captives were different in each case.”

The join statement emphasized that all reports were published based on internationally accepted norms for investigations and data gathering processes.

“We strongly urge high-ranking officials to refrain from publicly speaking on such sensitive issues, and to not exploit them for political or other purposes, as such steps are successfully used by Azerbaijan before international organizations—including judicial bodies—as their defense and for their own benefit, and to the detriment of the rights of the Armenian captives,” warned Tatoyan, Sahakyan and Zeynalyan.

The three stressed that such statements by high-ranking officials create obstacles for them to advance their mission of advocating for human rights.

An Azerbaijani military helicopter crashed on Tuesday during a training flight, killing 14 crew members and injuring two more, the South Caucasus country's state border service said.

The media reports said a military helicopter belonging to the Azerbaijani State Border Service (SBS) crashed on Tuesday morning while performing training flights in the Garaheybat airspace in the Khizi region near Azerbaijan's capital Baku.

As a result of the accident, many people lost their lives and several were injured, SBS said. According to several media outlets that cited the RIA news agency's report, some 14 people died during the incident and two more were wounded.

"Today, at around 10:40 a.m. GMT, a military helicopter belonging to the State Border Service crashed during training flights in the Khizi region," the statement read.

The SBS Command and the Attorney General's Office are at the scene. A joint investigation is underway regarding the incident.

Following the incident, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu extended condolences to Azerbaijan. Çavuşoğlu also had a phone call with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov about the incident, diplomatic sources reported. In the call, he wished Allah's mercy upon the "martyred" and a swift recovery to the wounded soldiers.

The incident came two weeks after Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia engaged in the worst fighting along their shared border since going to war last year over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The six-week war claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended in November 2020 with a Russian-brokered ceasefire. The deal saw Yerevan cede swathes of territory that it had controlled for decades.

Six Armenian troops and seven Azerbaijani soldiers were killed on November 16 in a flare-up in fighting. A truce was negotiated the same day by Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Tensions between Baku and Yerevan have been running high since May, when Armenia said Azerbaijan's military crossed its southern frontier to "lay siege" to a lake shared by the two countries.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a decadeslong dispute over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that lies within Azerbaijan but was occupied by ethnic Armenian forces backed by Russia since a war there ended in 1994.