Remarks by Permanent Representative of Armenia Mher Margaryan at the Side Event to the 75th Anniversary of the Genocide Convention, entitled “The Role of Religious Communites in Upholding and Implementing the Genocide”
28 November 2023
High Representative Moratinos,
Special Adviser Nderitu,
Thank you for organising this commemorative event in the run-up to the 75th Anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Within the United Nations, Armenia has been consistently campaigning to reinforce the implementation of the Convention and to advance the prevention agenda.
The International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime, which was established upon Armenia’s initiative, has evolved into a platform of dialogue and cooperation to foster prevention of atrocity crimes.
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The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect has a key role to play in advancing international efforts and prevention mechanisms through effective monitoring of grave human rights violations and assessing the risks of potential atrocities.
While the conceptual debates and deliberations are important and we appreciate the organisation of this side event OSAPG and Alliance of Civilizations – it is imperative to reflect and address the situations when violations are committed by perpetrators that are members of the United Nations.
Just recently, on 19 September, large-scale offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh took lives of hundreds of people, including children, and resulted in mass forced displacement of the entire population. It was preceded by humanitarian crisis that the people of Nagorno-Karabakh had been undergoing since the blockade of the Lachin Corridor in December 2022, an action that has been identified by the first Prosecutor of International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo as “the archetype of genocide through the imposition of conditions of life designed to bring about a group’s destruction”.
The premeditated and well-planned aggression against a population under blockade, which drove the entire population into forced displacement, is an explicit case of an ethnic cleansing, perpetrated under the UN’s watch. The entire ethnic Armenian population were driven out of their ancestral land, leaving behind their homes, their schools, their churches, their places of worship, the graveyards of their loved ones, thousands of monuments and artefacts of the vast Armenian cultural and religious heritage.
We appreciate that on 22 September 2023 the Special Advisor of the UN Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide issued a statement stressing that “Military action can only contribute to escalate what is already a tense situation and to put the civilian population in the area at risk of violence, including risk of genocide and related atrocity crimes”.
High Representative Moratinos,
Special Adviser Nderitu, distinguished colleagues,
The international community can no longer look the other way when faced with the clearly detectable signs of genocide, when grave and systematic human rights violations are routinely perpetrated. The United Nations, its respective bodies and structures have yet to meet their obligations vis-à-vis the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.
