Rights commissioner urges international sanctions against Armenian leadership

19 February 2021 12:00 (UTC+04:00)

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By Vafa İsmayilova

Azerbaijani Human Rights Commissioner Sabina Aliyeva has urged relevant sanctions against the Armenian military and political leadership as the actions they had committed are a gross violation of the provisions of international documents, local news sources reported.

Aliyeva reminded that in his recent interview with Armenia's Armnews channel, former Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan admitted that Armenia had used the Iskander operational-tactical ballistic missile (having especially great destructive power) at the last stage of the Second Karabakh War in the direction of now liberated Shusha city, making an attempt to reoccupy it.

The ombudsman stressed that at the same time, the ex-president openly admitted that during the war, the Armenian armed forces, using other missile systems had been deliberately shelling civilian targets in the Azerbaijani city of Ganja, which was beyond the war zone.

"This confirms again that the strikes inflicted by Armenia with the use of prohibited weapons on the inhabited civilian areas of Azerbaijan, located far from the war zone, resulted in numerous casualties. As a result, 94 civilians were killed, including 12 children, and 414 were injured, of whom 54 were children, and four children lost both parents," she said.

Aliyeva added that Armenia still attempts to mislead the world.

“Despite this, Armenia today continues to try to mislead the world community by spreading false information about the conflict, and this approach undermines the process of achieving peace after the conflict,” Aliyeva noted.

The rights commissioner underlined that “all this should be regarded as a gross violation by Armenia's current military-political leadership of the provisions of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols to them, especially the IV Geneva Convention for the Protection of Civilian Population in Time of War, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, the Convention on Child Rights and other international documents, appropriate sanctions must be applied".

During the war, losing on the battlefield, Armenia resorted to vicious attacks against Azerbaijani civilians, using widely banned cluster munitions. International human rights watchdogs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also verified the use of banned cluster bombs and rockets by Armenia in its attacks against Azerbaijani cities.

Ninety-four Azerbaijani civilians have been killed

On November 10, Baku and Yerevan signed a Moscow-brokered deal that brought an end to six weeks of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani army declared a victory against the Armenian troops. The signed agreement obliged Armenia to withdraw its troops from the Azerbaijani lands that it has occupied since the early 1990s.