Cases should be assessed by the MSD at the initiative of both countries.
The Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) said on Tuesday it has jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. This is the latest decision in the case of a long-term legal dispute between the two hostile countries, TASR writes, according to an AFP report.
For years, the Caucasian neighbors have been arguing over Nagorno-Karabakh on the territory of the MSD – a territory over which armed conflicts have been fought for decades.
A long-running dispute
Cases should be assessed by the MSD at the initiative of both countries. They concern Nagorno-Karabakh, over which the two countries have fought since 1991, when they gained independence from the Soviet Union. After its disintegration, this region, inhabited mostly by Christian Armenians, found itself within the borders of the mostly Muslim Azerbaijan, clarifies AFP.
Since then, Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars over this breakaway enclave – in the 1990s and in 2020.
The region has been controlled by Armenian separatists since the late 1990s. However, Baku took control of it last September after a one-day blitz offensive. The deportation of ethnic Armenians and the refugee crisis followed. Almost the entire population of 100,000 ethnic Armenians left for Armenia due to fears of possible reprisals.
Both countries filed MSD lawsuits against each other even after the end of the conflict in 2020. Armenia claims that Azerbaijan violated the international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and committed ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan denied these claims and filed a lawsuit saying that Armenia was the only one to blame.
The MSD, which adjudicates disputes between states, issued regulations in December 2021 calling on both sides to prevent incitement to racial hatred. On Tuesday, the court did not specify when the next hearings in the aforementioned cases would take place.
