Armenia announced on Friday that it has signed another agreement with Azerbaijan laying out the principles of delineating the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry said the “regulations” for joint activities of the two countries’ commissions dealing with the border delimitation and demarcation will be made public on Monday.
The two sides pledged in April to work them out by July 1 as part of a deal whereby the Armenian government controversially ceded four disputed border areas to Baku. They said at the time that the delimitation process will be based on the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration signed by newly independent ex-Soviet republics.
The declaration committed them to recognizing each other’s Soviet-era borders. But it does not contain a detailed description of those borders.
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Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly defended his unilateral concessions, saying that they will lay the groundwork for Azerbaijan’s recognition of Armenia’s territorial integrity. He has also said that this “positive experience” will be used for delimiting other sections of the nearly 1,000-kilometer-long border.
Pashinyan’s government on Tuesday did not explicitly say that the regulations agreed upon by Yerevan and Baku mention the Alma-Ata Declaration. In comments to the official Armenpress news agency, its press office only cited the relevant understanding reached in April.
Nor did the office clarify which sections of the border will be delimited next and when. It said the two sides are due to agree on that “sequence” after having the regulations validated by their respective state bodies. Armenia’s Constitutional Court must uphold the regulations’ conformity with the constitution before they can be sent to the Armenian parliament for ratification, added the office.
On August 30, Deputy Foreign Minister of the Republic of Armenia Vahan Kostanyan received Siddhartha Sankar Datta, the World Health Organization Representative, newly appointed Head of the WHO Country Office in Armenia, on the occasion of handing over the copy of his credentials.
Congratulating Siddhartha Sankar Datta upon the assumption of the important mission, Vahan Kostanyan highlighted the significance of strengthening and expanding cooperation with the WHO aimed at increasing the quality and inclusiveness of healthcare in Armenia.
In this context, Vahan Kostanyan commended Organisation’s operative response to the health needs of forcibly displaced persons from Nagorno-Karabakh and victims of the flood in the northern regions of Armenia, as well as the support to the Ministry of Health and the National Center for Disease Control of the Republic of Armenia.
During the meeting, the parties discussed the current course and prospective directions of program cooperation between Armenia and the WHO.