News - Armenia ruling force MP: Rest is matter of legal technique if 3 principles are recorded in peace treaty text

Despite the verbal agreements, Armenia and Azerbaijan have not yet reached an agreement on specifying the three main principles in the peace treaty. This was announced by Sargis Khandanyan, an MP of the ruling majority Civil Contract Faction and Chair of the Standing Committee on Foreign Relations of the National Assembly of Armenia, reports the RFE/RL Armenian Service. According to him, if there were such an agreement, Armenia's assessments would be optimistic. "If those three principles are recorded in the [peace treaty] text in the form that we imagine and there was a verbal agreement, the rest is a matter of legal technique, so to speak, already. It is a matter of finalizing the legal wording and some other provisions, some of which have already been agreed upon," said Khandanyan. Those principles are the complete recognition of each other's territorial integrity based on the Alma Ata declaration of 1991, the latter should be the basis of the border delimitation process, and regional communications should be opened by respecting the principles of sovereignty, jurisdiction, equality, and reciprocity of the countries. Sargis Khandanyan said that some progress has been made in the recent two-day negotiations between the Armenian and Azerbaijani FMs, but he did not open any brackets in this regard. "It became possible to make some progress on some issues. But still, if the progress had been such that it would have been possible to talk about a possible signing, about the timeframes, then there would have been comments about it. But at the moment I assume and find that there is need for additional work and there is a need for new meetings," said the MP of the Armenian ruling force.