Three years after the genocide in Nagorno Karabakh, Christian Solidarity International and partners warn the UN Human Rights Council that appeasement by the international community toward Azerbaijan puts Armenia at risk of the same fate.
Experts gathered at the UN in Geneva to address about the ongoing threat to Armenians. Left to right: Joel Veldkamp, Lorena Lopez de Lacalle, Karnig Kerkonian, Armine Aleksanyan, and Thibault van den Bossche. csi.
GENEVA – Azerbaijan, three years after driving out the entire indigenous Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh, is today engaged in a “deliberate, state-planned erasure” of Armenian heritage, speakers at a UN Human Rights Council side event warned on Tuesday.
“We convene in Geneva to denounce a profound institutional failure,” said Thibault van den Bossche of the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ).
“As we speak, a 2,000-year-old Christian culture faces deliberate, state-planned erasure,” he told attendees gathered at the Palais de Nations and online.
Van den Bossche flagged Azerbaijan’s demolition of churches, an Armenian Genocide memorial, and a medieval cemetery – all confirmed by satellite imagery and carried out since the September 2023 ethnic cleansing.
“These demolitions rewrite history to erase the memory of 120,000 forcibly displaced Armenians. Azerbaijan falsifies the records to say native monuments are not Armenian but Caucasian Albanian,” he said. “After the people, the stones.”
Armine Aleksanyan, the former deputy foreign minister of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) – and current member of the committee tasked by the government in exile with advocating for their rights at the international level – spoke on behalf of her people.
“With every year, the Armenian trace of Artsakh is being removed. Azerbaijan is rewriting the history of the place,” she said.
With its demolitions and distortions, Baku seeks to stamp out evidence of Armenian civilization, “whereas Armenians are indigenous to that land and lived there for millennia,” she said.
Despite International Court of Justice orders in their favor, the people of Artsakh are not receiving support for a dignified return, let alone monitoring and protection for prisoners or religious sites, she emphasized.
Instead, Aleksanyan said, “We have seen pressure from the international community to pretend nothing has happened.”
That is evident not only in the lack of UNESCO monitoring missions to protect cemeteries and churches from demolition and distortion, but also high-profile Azerbaijani state-guided visits to the emptied territory.
On the third anniversary of the ethnic cleansing, Azerbaijan bussed in dozens of diplomats to the emptied territory, who were videotaped dancing and giggling as a top aide to the Azerbaijani president claimed that Armenians had fabricated their manuscripts and history.
“Of course, we all want peace,” said Aleksanyan. None more so than the people of Nagorno Karabakh, she said, who now live in exile “away from their churches, where they have been baptized and wed, away from their graves of their ancestors.”
Azerbaijan is meanwhile doing everything in its power to cement this genocide and demonstrate that the land shaped by Armenians through the generations is “over – it’s history.”
“But human rights cannot be history. Human rights is a living issue that we have to struggle for,” said Aleksanyan.
The United Nations must assume its function in that effort, panelists agreed, so that International Court of Justice orders can be fulfilled, and the people of Artsakh may ultimately exercise their right of return with international security guarantees.
Lorena Lopez de Lacalle, President of the European Free Alliance, which counts the Democratic Party of Artsakh as a member, spoke next, recalling her three visits to the Artsakh Republic and the bond of the people to their monasteries, lands, and communities.
“For a people, there is nothing worse than ethnic cleansing, experiencing the fact that someone wants to eradicate it from this earth and works to ensure it falls into oblivion.
“That is why we are all here – to speak up, and to act,” said De Lacalle.
She emphasized the right to self-determination, a central value to her political alliance of 39 parties across Europe, as inextricably linked to human rights.
“The might of power and wars have never resolved the problems that spawned them. Lasting solutions are only possible through generosity from all parties,” she said.
“You are diplomats,” she said, addressing those gathered. “Not everything is final or beyond remedy.”
While release of the prisoners and return of the displaced may today seem impossible, she said, “hope is fueled by the purposeful determination of many.”
An urgent issue in need of remedy is the condition of Armenian prisoners of war and captured statesmen, now de facto hostages of Azerbaijan, some of whom have been held for nearly six years.
Azerbaijan forced shut the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Baku in 2025, severing the last link between the prisoners and their families and independent lawyers.
Siranush Sahakyan, who represents the Armenian prisoners at the European Court of Human Rights, said that Azerbaijan has not allowed for even a single meeting to take place between her and her clients.
The captive Armenians are thus denied representation as they are subject to torture and cut off from contact with their families, following what the European Parliament has slammed as “sham trials.”
Sahakyan shared a video testimony from Hranush Shahbazan, the wife of Lyudvig Mkrtchyan, who was captured during the 2020 Karabakh war.
In the video, Hranush said that she only learned that Lyudvig was alive through videos disseminated on social media in Azerbaijan, in which he was seen being beaten and tortured with barbecue skewers.
His hands were mangled to the point that he is unable to write letters to his family. His daughter lives in such distress, Hranush said, that she was unable to complete school.
“The confirmation that he had survived came with the knowledge of his suffering,” commented Sahakyan, who heads the Yerevan-based International and Comparative Law Center, as well as the Helsinki Committee of Armenia.
A matter of great concern for the prisoners and families, Sahakyan said, is a clause in the U.S.-brokered normalization framework for Armenia and Azerbaijan announced at a White House summit in August 2025, which would require Armenia to “withdraw, dismiss, or otherwise settle” all interstate claims against Azerbaijan once an eventual treaty comes into force.
“What has actually changed since the Washington Summit, in this ‘era of peace’?” asked Sahakyan. For the hostages, she said, “their protection has diminished.”
The month after Armenia and Azerbaijan initialed that agreement with great fanfare, the ICRC was forced to close its permanent delegation in Azerbaijan, removing “a vital safeguard.”
“Peace cannot be measured only by agreements signed, proceedings withdrawn, institutions closed, or goods transported,” Sahakyan said, but rather by the welfare of the people most impacted by the conflict.
The continued captivity of Armenian prisoners of war, whose release was mandated by the 9 November 2020 ceasefire announcement, and of Artsakh government officials, who were targeted for exercising their people’s right to self-determination, “is evidence that this peace remains untrue,” Sahakyan concluded.
Dr. Joel Veldkamp, Director for Public Advocacy at Christian Solidarity International, said there appeared to be an “unspoken consensus” between the United States, the Russian Federation, the European Union, and other interested powers that “peace” between Armenia and Azerbaijan could be built on ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure, and even hostage taking.
“This unspoken consensus stands in complete opposition to the values of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he emphasized.
Van den Bossche of the ECLJ prescribed key action items to halt Azerbaijan’s impunity.
He urged UN member states to freeze all expansions of energy contracts with Azerbaijan until the hostages are released. These commercial interests, he said, are used by Azerbaijan to “buy silence.”
He also called for urgent institutional oversight by the relevant UN bodies, namely that UNESCO be granted access to monitor the state of heritage sites in Nagorno Karabakh and that the UN Committee Against Torture be allowed access to the Armenian prisoners.
Panelist Karnig Kerkonian, also a member of the Nagorno Karabakh Committee, warned that the impunity Azerbaijan enjoys today for the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh is leaving the Republic Armenia exposed to the same fate.
“Even after forcibly displacing the entire Armenian population, [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev posted a video on X where he stood in front of a bonfire, stating that he was going to burn away even the aura of the Armenians. This is the language of genocidal intent,” said Kerkonian, an international lawyer.
“Nagorno Karabakh is Aliyev’s Sudetenland. It’s not the end, it’s the beginning. He refers to Armenia as Western Azerbaijan,” he emphasized, citing the Azerbaijani leader’s own statements that Armenia is not worthy of statehood.
To ignore Azerbaijan’s active campaign of erasing and claiming Armenian heritage, while Azerbaijan is openly and at the highest levels of government setting its sights on Armenia itself, represents a dangerous strategy of appeasement, Kerkonian said.
He urged implementation of the November 2023 ICJ order that Azerbaijan must allow Armenians to return to their homes in Nagorno Karabakh safely, immediately, and without impediment.
That could be negotiated through the Swiss Peace Initiative, a 2025 parliamentary resolution that mandates the Swiss government to convene a peace platform that would bring together the government of Azerbaijan and representatives of the people of Nagorno Karabakh.
Delay could spell disaster, Kerkonian warned, not only for the displaced, but for the Republic of Armenia.
“The Armenian Genocide was the first phase of the destruction of the Armenian people, Nagorno Karabakh was the second, and if we don’t hold Azerbaijan accountable this time, I am certain we will soon see in our very lifetimes that fateful last and final phase,” he said.
“That is why Nagorno Karabakh and the right of return matters so critically right now. It’s not simply a political aspiration; it’s not the sentimental demand of a displaced people.
“It’s how you end appeasement. It’s how you curb genocidal intent. It’s how you prevent the next stage of the ongoing genocidal catastrophe that awaits the Armenian people.”
Christian Solidarity International (CSI) is an interconfessional Christian human rights group, campaigning for religious liberty and human dignity, and assisting victims of religious persecution, victimized children, and victims of catastrophe.
CSI is an NGO with consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
Christian Solidarity International was founded in Switzerland in 1977 by Rev. Hans Stückelberger and is active in more than 20 countries with public advocacy initiatives and humanitarian aid projects.
Contact: Patrick Degenhardt | [email protected]
Media contact: Dr. Joel Veldkamp | [email protected]
