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Resuming the activity of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe subcommittee on the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno Karabakh conflict was discussed Friday at a PACE bureau meeting as part of the assembly’s winter session, new PACE President, Jean-Claude Mignon, said in an interview with Azerbaijan’s Trend news agency.

"A decision has been made that the activity of the subcommittee on Nagorno Karabakh will not be resumed soon," he said. "We need time to consider this issue thoroughly. We should reconsider the issue at the meeting of the Bureau, to be held in Paris on March 9, to make a decision on future activity of the subcommittee at the PACE spring session, due in April."

Mignon said resuming work of the subcommittee is possible, but it is not the only option.

"The other option is that we won't set up a new subcommittee on Nagorno Karabakh and the OSCE Minsk Group will deal with the Nagorno Karabakh conflict," Mignon said. He said no details regarding the issue are available yet, reiterating that it will be reconsidered in March.

The PACE subcommittee was established in 2005 to oversee the implementation of the assembly’s resolution calling for a pullout of Armenian troops from the 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. Efforts by the US, Russian and French co-chairs of the mediating Minsk Group have been largely fruitless so far.

This story is published by AzerNEWS Weekly under a project funded by the Foundation for State Assistance to the Development of the Media under the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.