Azernews.Az

YEREVAN – Armenia has said it will maintain its membership in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe during Turkish lawmaker Mevlut Cavusoglu’s presidency in the PACE but will not be represented in its subcommittee on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.

David Arutyunyan, head of the Armenian delegation to PACE, said the recent decision by a PACE bureau to resume the subcommitee’s work that was suspended earlier had been passed with procedural flaws, but he did not elaborate on the alleged violations.

"It is not known yet what this subcommittee will be doing," he claimed. "We will not take part in a process that will hurt the talks [on settling the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict]…What we are concerned with is that this subcommittee will be a venue for not dialog but tough confrontations."

The subcommittee 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 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.

Last Friday, PACE decided at its winter session to resume the subcommittee’s activity. Spanish lawmaker Jordi Xucla i Costa was elected chairman of the subcommittee. The subcommittee is due to begin work in April.

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. Over a decade of efforts by US, Russian and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far.