News - Karabakh high-ranking leaders held in Azerbaijan will probably be the last to be returned, lawyer says

We still have about 80 individual cases from the 44-day war [in 2020], here Azerbaijan has a denial policy and does not want in any way to solve the cases through investigation and ensure the right to the truth for the families. Lawyer Siranush Sahakyan, Head of the "Center for International and Comparative Law" NGO of Armenia, stated this at the press conference Monday. "The issue of the missing persons is also continuously considered unsolved. About 210 captured persons were repatriated from Azerbaijan to Armenia. Political discussions are underway regarding the return of Armenian captives. But these political discussions are of secondary importance; that is, the primary object of the negotiations is not the repatriation of these persons, but mainly the negotiations are being conducted on issues of an interstate nature, including the peace treaty, the parties have an agreement that after resolving the issues, as a secondary consequence, the Armenians being detained there will also return to their homeland. I believe that the high-ranking [Nagorno-Karabakh] leaders [being held in Azerbaijan] will be repatriated the last, and at the moment when Azerbaijan will have used their factor to the maximum for both domestic and foreign political purposes," Sahakyan noted. According to her, if Armenia withdraws its international lawsuits against Azerbaijan, it turns out that it will also lose the legal leverage to repatriate those persons.