News - Attorney: Any Azerbaijani invasion will make residents of Armenia's Tavush Province military targets as well

Any Azerbaijani invasion will make the residents of Armenia's Tavush Province military targets as well; here we can have considerable human losses. Lawyer Siranush Sahakyan, Head of the "Center for International and Comparative Law" NGO, stated this at the press conference Monday. "Azerbaijani troops always have such deployment when they take control of vital objects; they can be reservoirs, power plants, or infrastructure necessary for life. By targeting these vital facilities, they force [local] residents to leave their places of residence. There is also an issue of property rights here; these persons have the right to protected property, as well as the right to live in their own place of residence," Sahakyan noted and added that this issue exists also for the Armenians of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). And reflecting on the guarantees, Sahakyan said: "These areas are within the internationally recognized borders of Armenia. These violations of human rights can also be qualified as international crimes. Ratification of the Rome Statute [of the International Criminal Court] by the Republic of Armenia will provide an opportunity to respond to these violations by bringing the issue to the attention of the International Criminal Court. There is a political element here. To what extent will Armenia, apart from ratifying the Rome Statute, take real steps to put the International Criminal Court into operation in this region? The International Criminal Court is a tougher and more influential mechanism compared to the [UN] International Court of Justice in the sense that the issue of state accountability is discussed there, while the issue of criminal accountability of individuals is raised at the Criminal Court; as a rule, those persons are officials. If Armenia is under pressure [by Azerbaijan] to abandon the mechanisms that assume state accountability, I believe the fear is so great that they, Armenia’s authorities, will refrain from such legal processes, as a result of which the leader of Azerbaijan, or other [Azerbaijani] officials will appear before the International Criminal Court.”