The renowned first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, on December 18, published his second report on the 2023 genocide of the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) people by Azerbaijan. The full report can be found here.
This paper focuses on the Nagorno-Karabakh situation, affirming the urgency to release more than twenty victims of genocide, including three former Nagorno-Karabakh presidents and five other community leaders, incarcerated in Azerbaijan. Their captivity is part of the genocide and a message to their community: if you come back to Nagorno-Karabakh, you will be starved, incarcerated or killed.
The 75th anniversary of the Genocide Convention’s adoption exposes the consistent state parties’ position to deny the commission of genocide. In the last months of 2023, the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide alerted about six different situations where there is a risk of genocide against ethnic groups, including the Rohingya, the Nagorno-Karabakh people, the Tigray in Ethiopia, the Israelis and Palestinians, and the Masalit in Darfur, Sudan.
State parties of the Genocide Convention, like the US, France, the UK, Germany, Israel and Russia, ignored information about the serious risk of genocide for the Nagorno-Karabakh people. Instead, they wanted to facilitate an agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan to avoid new hostilities and to achieve economic and geopolitical national interests. Israel, for instance, benefited from substantial weapons sales to Azerbaijan. State parties of the Convention should not benefit from genocide.
Their obligation to prevent genocide requires to continue assessing President Aliyev’s genocidal intention to attack Armenia, ensure reparations for those who have lost their lives and their property in Nagorno-Karabakh, guarantee the rights of the ethnic group to return to their ancestral land safely, and to release the “Armenian prisoners.”
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Artak Beglaryan’s testimony, the short video version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-k_MKzhCtI, is evidence of the serious mental harm suffered by the entire ethnic group as established by the Genocide Convention Article II b).
The report analyzes in detail three topics:
a) the ethnic cleansing against a group of Armenians living for centuries in Nagorno-Karabakh constituting genocide and deportation as a crime against humanity.
b) regarding the prevention of genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh, the consistent state practice was to ignore the information about genocide against the targeted ethnic group.
c) regarding the obligation to punish genocide, the International Criminal Court will obtain jurisdiction at the beginning of February to investigate President Aliyev for crimes committed in Armenia since 10 May 2021.
