Azernews.Az

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is expected to monitor the contact line of the Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on July 2, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said.

The monitoring will be held under the mandate of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Personal Representative, on the contact line located to the south-west from the village of Tapgaragoyunlu of Azerbaijan's Goranboy region, the ministry said.

On the Azerbaijani side, the monitoring will be carried out by OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Personal Representative Andrzej Kasprzyk and field assistant Evgeny Sharov.

On the opposite side, the monitoring will be conducted by field assistants of OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Personal Representative, Hristo Hristov, Peter Svedberg and Jiri Aberle.

For over two decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict which emerged over Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor.

Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions.

A fragile ceasefire has been in place since 1994, but long-standing efforts by U.S., Russian and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far. Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. Security Council's four resolutions on its pullout from the neighboring country's territories.