Azernews.Az

BAKU – The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has passed a decision at its winter session to resume the work of the suspended PACE body on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.

Spanish lawmaker Jordi Xucla i Costa was elected chairman of the subcommittee at a PACE bureau meeting on Friday.

Samad Seyidov, head of the Azerbaijani delegation to PACE, told journalists that Armenia had voted against the measure.

According to him, the subcommittee will include co-rapporteurs of PACE’s Monitoring Committee for Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as both pro-government and opposition parliament members from the two countries’ delegations to the assembly.

Regarding the subcommittee chairman’s visit to the region, Seyidov said PACE is expected to discuss the issue in April.

The subcommittee on the Karabakh conflict was established in 2005 to oversee the implementation of the assembly’s resolution calling for a pullout of Armenian troops from occupied Azerbaijani territories. However, the body’s activity was suspended due to the death of its chairman Lord Russell Johnston in the summer of 2008. After Turkish lawmaker Mevlut Cavusoglu was elected PACE President in January 2010, he offered to resume its work, but the subcommittee had not been reinstated due to Yerevan’s opposition.

The Karabakh conflict emerged during the last few years of the Soviet Union. 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory, including Nagorno Karabakh, has been under Armenian occupation since the two South Caucasus republics signed a precarious cease-fire in 1994 following a lengthy war. Up to a million Azerbaijanis were displaced in the war that claimed some 30,000 lives. Over a decade of efforts by US, Russian and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far.