Top UN court ‘can consider Armenia, Azerbaijan cases'

THE HAGUE

The U.N.’s top court has said that it had jurisdiction to consider rival cases by arch-foes Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, the latest ruling in a long-running legal clash.  

The two Caucasus neighbors have for years been wrangling at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the territory that they have fought over for decades.  

“The Court finds that it has jurisdiction” to consider rival cases filed by Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2021, the court said in two separate statements.  

The cases concern actions taken in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been fought over since before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when former Soviet republics Armenia and Azerbaijan gained independence.  

The two nations have fought two wars, in 2020 and in the 1990s, for control of the then-breakaway enclave.  

Those claimed thousands of lives on both sides and caused hundreds of thousands to flee.  

The region has been controlled by Armenian separatists since the late 1990s, but last September, Baku took over the territory in a lightning one-day offensive.  

Following the conflict in 2020, the two sides filed tit-fortat suits at the ICJ against each other within a week in September 2021.  

Armenia contended that Azerbaijan has violated the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and that it has engaged in “ethnic cleansing” in the region.  

Azerbaijan has denied the allegations and filed a rival case, saying that Armenia was the one guilty of the charge.  

Besides ethnic cleansing, Baku also accused Yerevan of hate speech and “racist” propaganda.  

The ICJ, which rules in disputes between states, issued emergency orders in December 2021, calling on both parties to prevent incitement and promotion of racial hatred.  

It has since then been considering various motions filed by both countries against each other’s cases.