Question 37519 — foreign policy

Summary

Ms Isabelle Santiago alerts the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs on the consequences of the ceasefire agreement of November 9, 2020 signed by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia. Indeed, at this time, the Azeri government still refuses to apply one of its main clauses on the humanitarian level: the release of prisoners of war. An estimated two hundred are still detained in prisons Azeries. During a press conference given on February 26, 2021, President Ilham Aliyev declared that he considered these detainees as “terrorists” on the grounds that their arrest took place after November 9, 2021. However, these soldiers were on that date trapped in the Hadrout pocket, one of the main fronts during the conflict, a city surrounded but not yet occupied by Turkish-Azerbaijani-jihadist forces in moment of the signing of the ceasefire. By using this pretext, the Azerbaijani head of state is violating his obligations. This non-compliance with a signed document shatters any hope of a return to normal life for what remains of the Armenian people on their ancestral lands, a hundred years after the 1915 genocide. It can only be interpreted as a manifestation of additional aggression against this entity and this, after 44 days of military aggression, bombings and abuses which resulted in the death of 3,500 Armenian conscripts, most of them aged around twenty, and the flight of tens of thousands of refugees. The acts of war perpetrated during the last conflict raise fears of the worst for those whose fate is now subject to the arbitrariness of a regime ranked among the very last on the planet in the report on freedom and democracy that Freedom House has just published. This is a ranking which confirms that of all human rights NGOs, including Reporters Without Borders, which places Azerbaijan in 168th place out of 180 countries, in its ranking on press freedom. Also, she asks France, co-chair of the Minsk Group, in charge of negotiations for a peaceful resolution of the conflict, to use all its authority to obtain the release of Armenian prisoners of war. If this group mandated by the OSCE was unable to prevent war or defend the victims, let it at least ensure that this humanitarian clause of the ceasefire is respected. She asks him his intentions on this subject.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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