Azernews.Az

YEREVAN – Former Council of Europe Secretary General Walter Schwimmer has said Armenia is "making a mistake" by shrugging off the CE Parliamentary Assembly’s body on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.

"I don’t think that a boycott is the proper response to the Parliamentary Assembly and its bodies’ decisions," Schwimmer told Interfax Azerbaijan news agency.

David Arutyunyan, head of the Armenian delegation to PACE, has recently said Armenia will not be represented in the assembly’s reinstated subcommittee on the Karabakh conflict, claiming that PACE has discredited itself by its bias on the issue.

"The European policy and spirit require overall cooperation. That’s the nature of democratic decisions: you can disagree with the decisions passed, but you have to comply with them," said Schwimmer, who served as the CE’s Secretary General in 1999-2004.

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