The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic has never been recognized as an illegal regime
Siranush Sahakyan, head of the “Center for International and Comparative Law” answered Zhirayr Voskanyan’s questions at the 1in.am studio. The interviewer asked how Azerbaijan can prove that the Armenian captives are “terrorists” or led a “terrorist structure.” According to Sahakyan, the starting point is that the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic did not exist, it violated the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, therefore any activity carried out by the administration of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is in itself illegal.
Sahakyan once again emphasized that the self-declaration of independence of Nagorno-Karabakh has become a subject of discussion of the UN Security Council, and the Security Council did not qualify it as an act violating the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and, most importantly, did not call on the UN member states to collectively not recognize the self-proclaimed republic.
“This significant factor in itself excludes any assumption that the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is an “illegal regime.” We should compare this reality with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, when the UN Security Council, discussing that conflict, noted that the self-declaration violates the territorial integrity of Cyprus, therefore the act of self-declaration is invalid under international law. A unilateral declaration of independence has no right to exist, and any UN member state that attempts to politically recognize the independence of a self-proclaimed republic will violate the UN Charter, which is not the case with the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic," said Sahakyan.
Azerbaijani courts are trying to convince the international community that the actions of the former leaders of Artsakh and other Armenians are terrorism, or at least can be placed in the chain of the creation of armed groups, participation and other criminal actions related to it. In this case, are those international structures that have interacted with the self-proclaimed republic considered to be supporters of terrorism? Sahakyan puts forward another argument in response to this question: The UN Security Council has delegated the powers of a legitimate political solution to the status of the problem to the OSCE Minsk Group, while it is self-evident that the status issues of terrorist groups cannot be delegated by the Security Council to such serious structures as the OSCE Minsk Group.
"Within the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group negotiations, the Republic of Artsakh was recognized as an interested party and even participated in separate negotiations. Let's not forget that the documents signed with the participation of Azerbaijan in the 1990s contain the signatures of representatives of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. In other words, Azerbaijan has also recognized the negotiation process with the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic as legitimate," said Sahakyan.
According to Sahakyan, there is a number of evidence that excludes the accusations related to terrorism. But Azerbaijan is trying to achieve judicial confirmation of these political narratives by using force, by crushing its own judicial system. Speaking about the motion submitted by the military-political leadership of Artsakh, according to which, for example, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia and the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs should be summoned for questioning, Siranush Sahakyan said that this motion has shown that the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic has been a participant in regulated foreign relations, has been an interested party, whose legitimacy has been accepted by various structures, and in such conditions, it is simply absurd to bring charges of terrorism or other similar charges.
"The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic was recognized as a unit and was a subject of legal, multilateral, bilateral, international relations, and all the actions that were under that administration are legal in nature. But if we come from the opposite logic, namely that they were illegal, it automatically turns out that the subjects who were parties to those relations also committed criminal acts. For example, the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, according to the mentioned logic, are also accomplices, or the Russian peacekeepers who were deployed in the so-called "occupied by the terrorist group" territory are also accomplices. Here the question of the responsibility of all the leaders of the Republic of Armenia may also arise, since they were also guarantors of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, and being a guarantor of a terrorist group is also a crime," said Sahakyan.