Friday, June 19 2015 10:36

The Nagorno-Karabakh Parliament has issued a statement on the PACE Monitoring Group's draft report on democratic institutions in Azerbaijan and a related resolution on the Karabakh-Azerbaijani conflict. PACE's report contains wordings that are not acceptable to the Armenian side.     

 

In particular, the NKR Parliament says that in their draft report the PACE co-rapporteurs not only fail to fix the setback in the activities of the democratic institutions in Azerbaijan but also write about the Karabakh- Azerbaijani conflict in the very first paragraph, using the wordings, which have nothing to do with the reality and are applied by the Azerbaijani propaganda only.  

 

The NKR parliamentarians also express their concern about the fact that such wordings in the PACE report obviously encourage Azerbaijan's steps aimed at undermining the intermediary efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group (Russia, the United States, France), which is the only internationally mandated format in the Karabakh peace process. 

 

"Moreover, the aspiration to distort and unilaterally present the core of the conflict in this document is perceived as an attempt to justify Azerbaijan's numerous rough violations in human rights and democracy by the fact that Azerbaijan is still a conflicting country.  The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic's 24-year experience in building independent democratic statehood perfectly demonstrates that it is possible to establish and strengthen human rights, basic freedoms and democratic values even amid an unresolved conflict," says the statement.

 

In this light, the NKR lawmakers, who qualify the Council of Europe as the leading structure disseminating the principles of human rights and rule of law and who are convinced that the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is a part of the European space that is guided by the European system of values, urge their colleagues in PACE to remain committed to the goals and the missions of the Council of Europe and to prevent adoption of the distorted document based on unilateral wordings. The NKR MPs also suggest that the Council of Europe and other structures should establish a direct dialogue with the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.

 

To note, the draft report of the Monitoring Group contains a wording "on Armenia's occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent territories."