The Baku regime is deliberately targeting former Artsakh State Minister Ruben Vardanyan, who is currently held captive on trumped up charges in Azerbaijan, Artak Beglaryan, Artsakh’s former human rights defender said on Thursday.
“Since there’s been a special focus on Ruben Vardanyan by various international organizations, the Azerbaijani authorities have been displaying a ‘special’ negative attitude toward Ruben Vardanyan,” Beglaryan, who also served as State Minister before Vardanyan, said at a news conference.
“Of course, such an attitude exists toward all political leaders, but it is widely emphasized in Vardanyan’s case, since his lawyers and family have been fighting more publicly and aggressively against those criminal cases,” he added.
Beglaryan said all criminal cases initiated by the Azerbaijani authorities against the former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh are fabricated. The charges include terrorism, terror funding and others.
“You can’t anyhow fit the fight of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh into terrorism, because from a military perspective we were conducting self-defense, while the rest was entirely a political struggle, whose leaders were the former officials who are now in the prisons of Baku,” Beglaryan said.
Vardanyan’s legal team had earlier released a statement saying that, in an unprecedented escalation of its ongoing crackdown on dissent, Azerbaijani prosecutors have unveiled a new array of some 45 potential charges against unlawfully detained Vardanyan. If convicted, Vardanyan faces the grim prospect of life imprisonment.
Beglaryan also said there are 16 prisoners of war currently being held captive in Azerbaijan, without any charges filed against them.
He also was asked about the ongoing talks on a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Beglaryan opined that a peace agreement is far from being signed, given Baku’s posturing on issues.
“This possible document cannot be a peace treaty or agreement. At best, it will be a document on the restoration or normalization of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but nothing more,” Beglaryan said.
According to him, a peace agreement implies a document that addresses and resolves all the key components of the conflict.
“At a minimum, all the major issues of this conflict should be addressed at a fundamental level. The issue of prisoners is one of the smallest. It is the easiest to resolve,” the former state minister said.
The Armenian side, he added, has, for example, the issue of the return of the people of Artsakh to their homeland, the protection of their property, cultural heritage, and more.
Speaking at the OSCE Ministerial Council meeting on December 5, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said that Armenia and Azerbaijan have made some progress toward signing a peace agreement, noting that the parties have already agreed on 15 of the 17 articles of the preamble and the draft agreement. With sufficient political will, it can be quickly finalized and signed.
Earlier, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev stated that one of the disagreements concerns the non-deployment of third-country forces on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, and the second concerns the withdrawal of lawsuits filed against each other in international courts.
