Nagorno-Karabakh: UN to hold emergency meeting on Azerbaijan’s blockade of road from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh
Armenia’s UN Ambassador Mher Margaryan requested for the assembly on the dire scenario in Nagorno-Karabakh in a letter to the ambassador of the US, which holds the Safety Council presidency this month.
The US Mission to the UN mentioned Monday the emergency assembly will happen on Wednesday afternoon.
In his letter to Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Margaryan mentioned Azerbaijan’s full blockade since July 15 of the Lachin Hall – the one street connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia – has created extreme shortages of meals, medication and gasoline.
“The deliberate creation of insufferable life circumstances for the inhabitants is nothing however an act of mass atrocity focusing on the indigenous individuals of Nagorno-Karabakh and forcing them to depart their homeland,” he mentioned, stressing that this constitutes “an existential risk to them.”
Margaryan requested the Safety Council, which is charged with making certain worldwide peace and safety, “to stop mass atrocities together with warfare crimes, ethnic cleaning, crimes towards humanity and genocide.”
Nagorno-Karabakh got here beneath the management of ethnic Armenian forces backed by the Armenian navy in separatist preventing that led to 1994. Armenian forces additionally took management of considerable territory across the Azerbaijani area.
Azerbaijan regained management of the encircling territory in a six-week warfare with Armenia in 2020. A Russia-brokered armistice that ended the warfare left the area’s capital, Stepanakert, linked to Armenia solely by the Lachin Hall, alongside which Russian peacekeeping forces have been supposed to make sure free motion.
Margaryan accused Azerbaijan of violating the Russian-brokered armistice and worldwide humanitarian regulation in addition to orders by the Worldwide Court docket of Justice in February and July. The UN’s highest court docket mentioned in its orders that Azerbaijan ought to “take all measures to make sure unimpeded motion of individuals, autos and cargo alongside the Lachin Hall in each administrators,” the Armenian ambassador mentioned.
Azerbaijan’s International Ministry has accused Armenia of violating its territorial integrity and sovereignty and of smuggling weapons into Nagorno-Karabakh.
Final week, the previous chief prosecutor of the Worldwide Legal Court docket warned that Azerbaijan is getting ready genocide towards ethnic Armenians in its Nagorno-Karabakh area and known as for the Safety Council to carry the matter earlier than the worldwide tribunal.
Luis Moreno Ocampo mentioned in a report requested by a gaggle of Armenians, together with the nation’s president, that on account of the blockade “there’s a cheap foundation to imagine {that a} genocide is being dedicated.”
He mentioned the UN conference defines genocide as together with “intentionally inflicting on the group circumstances of life calculated to result in its bodily destruction.”
