The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has condemned the 15-year prison sentence handed down to Mr. Vagif Khachatryan on 7 November 2023 by the Republic of Azerbaijan. The Lemkin Institute exhorts the international community to persuade the regime of President Aliyev into promptly releasing all Armenian persons under its jurisdiction and to refrain from providing any kind of assistance that could worsen the suffering of the victims of the Artsakh genocide or embolden Azerbaijan to perpetrate any unlawful act of aggression.
A resident of the Republic of Artsakh, Mr. Khachatryan was detained at the illegal Hakari Bridge checkpoint on 29 July 2023 while he was being evacuated from his homeland by the International Committee of the Red Cross for urgent medical treatment. This checkpoint was established by Azerbaijan in the Lachin Corridor in April 2023, four months after Azerbaijan’s illegal blockade of the same corridor on 12 December 2022. This blockade left the then 120,000 inhabitants of Artsakh without essential goods and services, constituting a textbook case of genocide-by-attrition, as accurately observed by the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo.
Mr. Khachatryan’s abduction took place before Azerbaijan’s military aggression against Artsakh on 19 September 2023, which resulted in massacre and atrocity and the consequent flight of almost 100 percent of its indigenous Armenian population to neighboring Armenia. The aggression, atrocity and forced displacement amount to a very thorough genocide of an ancient, continuous indigenous civilization.
Upon his abduction, Mr. Khachatryan was immediately accused by Azerbaijani authorities of committing war crimes during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the 1990s, charges he has repeatedly denied and for which Azerbaijan has offered no independent evidence.
The Lemkin Institute recalls the ongoing and unlawful imprisonment of the eight high-ranking Armenian officials, as well as the abandonment of dozens and perhaps hundreds of Armenian civilian captives and POWs, as outlined in its aforementioned statement, who might soon share the same fate as Mr. Khachatryan, if not worse. Time and time again, Azerbaijan has shown its repudiation of a law-based international order, including its obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law.
The Lemkin Institute exhorts the international community, which seems to have forgotten the commission of atrocity crimes in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, as well as the looming threat of an invasion of the Republic of Armenia by Azerbaijan, to persuade the regime of President Aliyev into promptly releasing all Armenian persons under its jurisdiction and to refrain from providing any kind of assistance that could worsen the suffering of the victims of the Artsakh genocide or embolden Azerbaijan to perpetrate any unlawful act of aggression.