News - Realities facing Armenia led it to actively engage international legal mechanisms

When Azerbaijan launched aggressive war against [Artsakh] Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, we faced the really grave realities of the human suffering: torture, human [mis]treatment, capture and forced disappearances, missing persons, captives and civilians dying, and tens of thousands of people being deprived of their homes. This was stated by the RA Representative on International Legal Matters Yeghishe Kirakosyan at the 21st autumn meeting of the OSCE PA in Yerevan today, November 19.“Over a month ago, we had the mass forceable displacement of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. So, all those realities that Armenia lived through in the past three years have prompted Armenia to be very active in regard to using international legal mechanisms,” he said. According to him, in particular, Armenia has been very active in initiating cases against Azerbaijan in the European Court of Human Rights.In connection with this, he highlighted interstate applications related to various cases of human rights violations, including the rights of minorities and various types of rights: property rights, the right to life, freedom from torture and inhumane treatment, the right to liberty, among others.“In the past three years, not only has Armenia been through these challenges, but I think it has also been challenging for the entire planet, because we have many conflicts erupting in different spots of the globe, and frozen conflict is exploding in the European continent and elsewhere. This is very worrying, of course, for us. That puts the international legal order to test, to see what the international legal order can do to deal with these conflicts,” Yeghishe Kirakosyan added.The representative of Armenia agreed with one of the previous speakers that it is important that the international legal order is more structured to prevent those conflicts rather than to deal with an active conflict.