Armenia asks ICJ to end ‘cycle of hate’ with Azerbaijan

Armenia asked UN judges on Thursday to stop what it called Azerbaijan’s fuelling of ethnic hatred as the two rivals faced off in a bitter tit-for-tat international court battle.

Both countries, who fought a war last year over Azerbaijan’s breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, have lodged cases with the International Court of Justice accusing the other of racial discrimination.

Armenia, speaking first before Azerbaijan gives its arguments next week, asked the Hague-based court to take emergency measures to protect Armenians during a case that could last years.

“With this application, Armenia instead seeks to prevent and remedy the cycle of violence and hatred perpetrated against ethnic Armenians,” said Yeghishe Kirakosyan, Armenia’s representative.

“And in its request for provisional measures Armenia urgently seeks to protect the rights of ethnic Armenians from imminent irreparable harm.”

Kirakosyan said the six-week war that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev “has openly admitted Azerbaijan started in September 2020 is the most recent link to this chain of ethnic violence and hate.

“We fear that it will not be the last until the roots of this conflict are addressed.”

Azerbaijan authorities were indoctrinating “generations upon generations” into a “culture of fear, of hate of anything and everything Armenian”, the Armenian lawyer said.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict last year claimed more than 6,500 lives. It ended in November with a Russian-brokered ceasefire under which Armenia ceded territories it had controlled for decades.

Nagorno-Karabakh is an ethnic Armenian region of Azerbaijan that broke away from Baku’s control in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Around 30,000 people have died during the years of conflict.

Both sides have long traded accusations of rights abuses, including in last year’s war.

In their cases at the ICJ, both countries accuse the other of breaching a UN treaty, the International Convention of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD).