Azernews.Az

The situation with resuming the work of the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly`s subcommittee on the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno Karabakh conflict remains unclear, PACE head Jean-Claude Mignon said on Monday.

Mignon told a press conference held on the sidelines of the PACE spring session that though the subcommittee`s activity was planned to be resumed, the issue was not raised at the PACE meeting on April 9.

This is a complicated question, Mignon said. However, I put forward the initiative to hold meetings with the Azerbaijani and Armenian delegations, perhaps, a joint meeting with the two delegations. I would like to hold meaningful and constructive dialogue with them.

This meeting could take place as part of the PACE spring session. But the Armenian delegation is not participating in the session due to the upcoming parliamentary elections. If this meeting does not take place, we will organize it on the sidelines of the June session.

Mignon said a meeting with the mediating OSCE Minsk Group`s co-chairman from France is planned as well, but added that it is hard to say when this will happen.

Head of the Azerbaijani delegation to PACE, Samad Seyidov, thanked the PACE president for his initiative to arrange a meeting with the Armenian delegation to the assembly.

According to him, as a PACE member, the Azerbaijani delegation has always supported such meetings and discussions, unlike the Armenian side.

Unfortunately, the Armenian delegation has rejected for two years all kinds of contacts with our delegation to discuss such an important issue as the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Seyidov said. Given the PACE president`s initiative, I believe that we are able to create such a format in which we are interested - the Azerbaijanis and Armenians - and the EU.

The PACE subcommittee on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict 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.with Azeri, Armenian MPs