Paris not backs illegal visits to Azerbaijan’s occupied lands
By Sara Rajabova
French Foreign Ministry has said the illegal visits of French officials to Azerbaijan's occupied territories don't represent official stance of Paris.
The ministry's official made the remark while commenting on a French town mayor's illegal visit to Azerbaijan's occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region.
"Such initiatives do not change the official stance of Paris, which did not recognize the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh," the official said at a briefing in Paris.
Armenian media reported earlier that Artsvik Sargsyan, illegal Mayor of Shusha, which is under the Armenian occupation over the past two decades, and Mayor of the French town of Bourg-les-Valence, Marlene Mourier, who visited occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region, signed a declaration of friendship between the two cities.
Baku has strongly condemned Mourier's visit to Azerbaijan's occupied territories, declaring it as illegal.
The ministry representative said France, as an OSCE Minsk Group co-chair, is seeking a diplomatic and political solution to the conflict.
The official noted that to give a new momentum to negotiations, the French president, during his visit to Baku and Yerevan in May 2014, proposed the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents to meet in Paris in autumn, and to discuss ways out of the situation.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan are expected to meet in late October on the initiative of French President Francois Hollande.
Unauthorized visits to Nagorno-Karabakh and other regions of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenia are considered illegal, and the individuals who pay such visits are included in Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry's "black list".
Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry in 2013 released a list of 335 people declared 'persona non grata' over their illegal visits to the Armenian-occupied territories. Some of these people were removed from the list after appealing to the Azerbaijani government.
Azerbaijan has repeatedly warned foreign officials and diplomats of unauthorized visits to its territories that are occupied by Armenia, calling them contradictory to international laws.
Baku has stated that such visits, paid without prior notification to the relevant authorities of Azerbaijan, are illegal and damage the settlement process of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenia occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions, after laying territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor that caused a brutal war in the early 1990s. Long-standing efforts by U.S., Russian and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far.