Lawyer warns against abandoning legal tools vs. Azerbaijan

During a discussion on the rights of Armenian captives and hostages held in Baku, Siranush Sahakyan, president of the International Comparative Law Center, stressed the importance of legal mechanisms.

She warned that by withdrawing international complaints against Azerbaijan, Armenia is retreating from one of the rare fields where it has consistently achieved victories, Panorama.am reported.

“Legal proceedings are so important that the pre-signed peace agreement text even contains a clause about them,” Sahakyan noted, adding that negotiations over withdrawing inter-state complaints were long and strategic.

She emphasized that Azerbaijan had done everything to secure this clause, fully aware of its consequences.

“In essence, Azerbaijan did two things: first, it used its negotiation leverage to force the withdrawal of inter-state complaints; second, to reinforce this, it initiated artificial judicial processes to pressure for such a clause. This shows exactly where Azerbaijan’s interests are vulnerable. Any legal process undermines Azerbaijan’s security, because truth neutralizes its aggressive policy. That’s why the only real antidote to this behavior is legal action,” she said.

According to Sahakyan, the legal field has been the only area where Armenia achieved real results, unlike the military or political fronts.

“The only domain where we’ve successfully pursued processes, both inter-state and individual, is the legal one. Now we are retreating from the field where we’ve been winners, only to remain on the field where we’ve been badly beaten, including on issues of national dignity,” she concluded.

On August 8, during a trilateral meeting at the White House, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a joint declaration. In the presence of the three leaders, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov pre-signed the “Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and Interstate Relations between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan.”