Azernews.Az

BAKU – President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Mevlut Cavusoglu, has arrived in Baku to attend the world forum on inter-cultural dialog to be held on Thursday.

"One of my duties as PACE president is to promote inter-cultural and inter-religious dialog in Europe," Cavusoglu told journalists upon arrival on Wednesday. "I consider strengthening dialog the most important tool to fight racism and religious strife that are on the rise nowadays."

Cavusoglu said further that in late January he had passed a decision to resume the work of PACE’s subcommittee on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.

"In practice, this was enforcement of the PACE resolution passed in 2005. We fulfilled the obligations vested in us. The time and venue for a meeting of the subcommittee will be determined by its members."

The subcommittee’s activity was suspended due to the death of its chairman Lord Russell Johnston in the summer of 2008. After Turkish lawmaker Cavusoglu was elected PACE president in early 2010, he offered to resume its work. The subcommittee is due to begin work this month, despite Yerevan’s staunch opposition.

Cavusoglu said PACE’s stance on the Karabakh conflict is clear-cut and builds on its resolution calling for a pullout of Armenian troops from the occupied Azerbaijani territories, adopted in 2005.

He noted that the OSCE Minsk Group is dealing with the conflict, but the problem "has various aspects concerning human rights and confidence building". "Our goal is to assist the solution of these problems," Cavusoglu said.

Commenting on the planned opening of an airport illegally rebuilt in the Armenia-occupied Nagorno Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, the PACE president said the issue is not on the agenda at this point, but Baku can raise it at the next session of the assembly.

The airport near Khankandi, the center of the self-proclaimed republic run by ethnic Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh, has been closed since the outbreak of the Karabakh war, which saw ethnic Armenian forces backed by Yerevan occupy the region. After rebuilding the facility, the region's separatist authorities said they intended to reopen it on May 9 to restart commercial flights to the Armenian capital Yerevan, which drew fire from Azerbaijani officials. But recent reports quoted the spokesman for the self-proclaimed republic’s leader as saying that the airport opening has been postponed for "technical reasons.