ArmInfo.There are about 80 Armenian prisoners of war, whose presence the Azerbaijani authorities still do not recognize. Representative of the interests of the Armenian prisoners of war in the European Court of Human Rights Siranush Sahakyan stated this on September 27 at a press conference.
According to her, as a result of the 44-day war in Artsakh, 156 Armenians have already been released from captivity and returned to their homeland, but many prisoners are still kept in Azerbaijan. "Before the war, on September 13, there were officially 33 prisoners of war in Azerbaijan, and in the post-war period, the cases of captivity increased by another 20," Siranush Sahakyan said.
She stressed that the work of human rights organizations is carried out on the basis of individual complaints, but an interstate process is taking place in the European Court. Sahakyan noted that legal efforts on the issue of prisoners of war were quite intense. "There are cases that did not even have a precedent, because Armenia previously refrained from initiating interstate cases against any state, although we had cases of an interstate nature with individual efforts, but for the first time the state itself is active in international legal instances," the human rights activist noted, adding that the only gap that can be filled in the litigation is to initiate the process of the country's accession to the UN International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, since recent developments have shown that Armenian prisoners of war are no longer just prisoners, they are being held as hostages and used as a measure increasing pressure on Armenia, and their repatriation is directly related to the solution of political issues.