Armenia on Reprieve: After Nagorno-Karabakh, the Trap of Appeasement

Three years after the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, a crucial UN conference organized on September 29, 2026, by Christian Solidarity International (CSI) and the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) breaks the silence. Amid cultural memoricide, hostage diplomacy, and geopolitical pressures, the total impunity enjoyed by Azerbaijan is not paving the way for peace.

Programmed Erasure: After the People, the Stones

The silence hanging over the hills of Nagorno-Karabakh is not that of peace, but of annihilation. Three years after the ethnic cleansing and forced exodus of its 120,000 indigenous inhabitants in September 2023, Azerbaijan is methodically orchestrating the memoricide of the ancient Armenian enclave of Artsakh. With observation missions barred from accessing the area, civil society relies on unyielding satellite imagery to document the irreversible destruction.

In April 2026, the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God and the Church of Saint James in Stepanakert were completely bulldozed by Baku. In May 2026, the organization Caucasus Heritage Watch authenticated the total demolition of the Memorial dedicated to the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. On September 6, 2026, the destruction of a medieval Armenian-Russian cemetery in Shusha completed the demonstration: even the land of the dead must be purged of any Armenian trace.

Emptying the region of its inhabitants and destroying its heritage is not enough; their very existence must be denied. This bulldozer vandalism is accompanied by a pernicious academic forgery: the systematic reattribution of Armenian heritage to the fanciful thesis of the "Caucasian Albanians." During our Geneva conference with Christian Solidarity International on September 29, 2026, Armine Aleksanyan, former Deputy Foreign Minister of Nagorno-Karabakh, offered a lucid diagnosis of this enterprise: "Azerbaijan is rewriting history. It is attempting to prove to the world that there were no Armenians here, even though our people have been indigenous to this land for millennia. This is the first time in history that Nagorno-Karabakh has been stripped of its original population."

See here in French the CNews article: "Nagorno-Karabakh: Hostages, torture... Three years after the exodus, the fate of Armenians at the heart of a UN event"

The cynicism reached its peak on September 11 and 12, 2026, when Baku orchestrated a field visit for 150 foreign diplomats, including representatives from the European Union and France. Seeing them stroll and smile through the walkways of the medieval Gandzasar monastery, nodding along to official revisionism, illustrates the moral bankruptcy of an anesthetized Western diplomacy. During this staging, Baku went so far as to misuse replicas of ancient Armenian manuscripts—a crude stratagem immediately denounced by the Matenadaran Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan.

For international lawyer Karnig Kerkonian, the eradication of the Armenian presence in Artsakh is not the epilogue of a territorial conflict, but rather the prelude to a much broader destructive process. Echoing the year 1938, the lawyer warns:

Nagorno-Karabakh is Aliyev's Sudetenland. Believing that a peace treaty will appease the dictator is the exact echo of Neville Chamberlain's illusion in Munich when facing Hitler. Historical Armenia is the target of the final phase. Aliyev publicly refers to Armenia as 'Western Azerbaijan' and claims on his official networks that it is not even worthy of being a servant. This is the raw rhetoric of genocidal intent.

This genocidal trend is rooted in a systematic dehumanization fueled by the highest levels of the Azerbaijani state, where officials refer to Armenians as "rats," "vermin," or "cancer"—even issuing a postage stamp depicting an agent in a decontamination suit cleaning Nagorno-Karabakh. If no firm international condemnation breaks Baku’s impunity, this downward spiral will inevitably continue to the detriment of the Armenian state.

The Diplomacy of Hostages and Gas

The mechanism of this impunity is clear. Europe has traded its dependence on Russian gas for a dependence on Azerbaijani gas, signing its political abdication. Baku, declared a "trusted partner" by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, knows this and now uses its prisoners as vulgar geopolitical bargaining chips. Twenty Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh—including top political leaders, prisoners of war, and civilians—are held in inhumane and degrading conditions, while 80 others are victims of enforced disappearances. On August 6, 2026, the Baku Court of Appeal sealed life sentences for former President Arayik Harutyunyan and former Commander Levon Mnatsakanyan, following closed-door sham trials.

International lawyer Siranush Sahakyan, who defends these hostages before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), revealed the depth of their humanitarian isolation since Baku forced the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to close its permanent delegation in late 2025:

Prisoners are deprived of independent lawyers, medical care, and consular visits. More alarmingly, families no longer receive any news. The peace agreement initialed in August 2025 in Washington under US auspices contains a revolting clause: the obligation for Armenia to drop all its international legal proceedings against Azerbaijan, without even guaranteeing the release of the hostages.

This "hostage diplomacy" is now being exported directly into Western capitals. On September 2, 2026, yielding to remonstrances from the Azerbaijani embassy, the Paris Municipality canceled its official participation in an exhibition dedicated to Karabakh prisoners. A few weeks later, on September 23, the pardon granted to French businessman Martin Ryan was only secured after French diplomacy pleaded with the European Union to lift sanctions on Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, a close Kremlin ally, revealing the collusion between Baku and Moscow.

See the intervention by Thibault van den Bossche during the conference: "Human Rights in Azerbaijan: Three years after the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh"

Nevertheless, a cross-party op-ed published on October 2, 2026, in Le Figaro demonstrates that these prisoners retain major political support in France. Initiated by 25 prominent figures from across the political spectrum—including Bruno Retailleau, Marine Tondelier, and Édouard Philippe—this appeal demands the immediate and unconditional release of these captives, described as hostages used to maintain pressure on Armenia to extract further concessions in the ongoing, arduous peace process.

In the United States, institutional resistance is also organizing: on October 5, 2026, more than 100 members of the US Congress officially called on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to suspend military aid to Azerbaijan. To justify this firm stance, lawmakers explicitly cited the arbitrary sentences handed down against Armenian detainees, the methodical destruction of Christian heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the ongoing military occupation of Armenia's sovereign territory.

Before the UN Human Rights Council, Baku is attempting to invert the narrative. In an oral statement on October 1, just two days after our Geneva conference, the "Azerbaijan National NGO Forum" accused Armenia of past war crimes, demanded the restitution of artifacts, and directly targeted Christian Solidarity International, accusing it of sabotaging the peace and regional normalization process.

The West Facing the Mirror of Its Principles

Baku's treatment of its own citizens is hardly more enviable than its treatment of Armenians. Adopted on June 24, 2026, under the explicit title "The silencing of critical voices in Azerbaijan," Resolution 2663 (2026) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) notes an unprecedented acceleration of the regime's authoritarian drift. Compiled figures show a historic peak of 328 political prisoners in May 2026, including prominent human rights defenders like Anar Mammadli. The Assembly also demands the immediate release of Nagorno-Karabakh leaders, characterizing their detentions as arbitrary.

The European Parliament also strongly condemns the politically motivated imprisonment of opposition figures and civil society representatives in its resolution of October 8, 2026 (2026/2914(RSP)). Facing an expanding pattern of repression, the European Parliament demands the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners, including the Armenian prisoners. It deplores the decision of the Milli Majlis (the Azerbaijani Parliament) to suspend its cooperation with the European Parliament and calls for its resumption. Finally, it reaffirms that any future EU-Azerbaijan partnership agreement must be strictly conditional upon tangible improvements in human rights and the rule of law, notably the release of political prisoners.

On April 2, 2026, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) had to carry out an ad hoc visit to Baku to denounce the systematic use of ill-treatment and the authorities' total lack of cooperation. On September 24, 2026, a coalition of exiled Azerbaijani NGOs formally petitioned the Secretariat General of the Council of Europe to trigger Article 52 of the European Convention. The reason invoked points to a structural issue: 68% of the binding judgments of the ECHR concerning Azerbaijan are purely and simply ignored by Baku. This represents an absolute record of defiance toward the European legal order for a country that has been a member of the Council of Europe since 2001, but whose delegation to PACE was suspended in January 2024 for failing to respect its commitments.

Behind the façade of international respectability that the regime attempts to project, Baku's methods of influence are now falling under the scrutiny of European judicial and security agencies. In France, the National Financial Prosecutor's Office (PNF) has been actively investigating since June 2023 strong suspicions of international corruption surrounding the activities of the tech giant Thales in Azerbaijan. In Germany, the foreign intelligence agency (BND) was thrown into turmoil following the arrest on October 6, 2026, of August Hanning. The former head of German counterintelligence is suspected of spying for a foreign service, with the trail leading directly to Azerbaijani infiltration networks.

Armenia Under Tension

In an attempt to preserve its sovereignty and break free from Moscow's historic tutelage, the government of Nikol Pashinyan, re-elected after the June 7, 2026 elections, is executing a critical geopolitical pivot toward the West. This choice exposes Yerevan to heavy economic sanctions from the Kremlin and revives tensions around the Russian 102nd military base in Gyumri, which the Prime Minister described on September 17, 2026, as a "burden that contributes nothing to the country's security." In an exclusive interview with RFI on October 12, Nikol Pashinyan definitively recorded this historic rupture, stating that Armenia's relations with Russia "can no longer be the same as before," while confirming his desire to accelerate rapprochement with the European Union.

Although the country has frozen its participation in the CSTO, it remains a member of the Eurasian Economic Union. To counter the Russian blockade and punitive measures, the European Commission introduced a temporary two-year trade preference regime, liberalizing nearly 80% of Armenian exports to provide urgent relief to local producers. Caught at the crossroads of Russian, Turkish, and Azerbaijani influences, the Armenian population expresses a deep thirst for peace, prioritizing immediate security over grand geopolitical narratives.

This drive for normalization at all costs is now pushing Nikol Pashinyan to consider unprecedented territorial reorganizations to resolve the explosive issue of enclaves and exclaves inherited from Soviet mapping and claimed by Baku. The Prime Minister now publicly discusses the possibility of physically "moving" entire Armenian villages to smooth out the frontline and avoid further military escalation. Although a peace project was initialed under the auspices of the White House in August 2025, its official signature remains stalled by Azerbaijan's veto. Baku demands a prior rewrite of the Armenian Constitution to remove any reference to unity with Nagorno-Karabakh. Despite this institutional blackmail, Pashinyan has set the horizon of 2031 to seal and ratify this definitive treaty, locking himself into a trap of appeasement, offering ever-more concessions without any guarantee of long-term viability.

The Armenian leadership has also engaged in a perilous internal confrontation with the Armenian Holy Apostolic Church, the millennial and constitutional guardian of national memory. Because Etchmiadzin (the seat of the Church) opposes the unilateral territorial concessions dictated by Baku, the ruling Civil Contract party has shifted into a logic of institutional purge. On September 24, 2026, the Prime Minister's office published a report noting a "systemic crisis" within the ecclesiastical institution, directly integrating doctrinal reform projects and the forced replacement of Catholicos Karekin II into the government's official program (2026–2031). This conflict is now taking an aggressive fiscal turn, with the Ministry of Finance considering levying taxes on Church activities to break its historic autonomy.

Between travel bans imposed on bishops, the dissolution of the military chaplaincy, the house arrests of dissident prelates, and an ever-widening rift with its historic strategic depth—the diaspora—the Armenian state apparatus is weakening its own structures of moral resilience at the precise moment when the external threat is at its peak. This scorched-earth policy extends to the very memory of the conflict: to comply with normalization demands, Yerevan municipal authorities are forcibly erasing urban murals depicting soldiers killed in action in Nagorno-Karabakh, triggering outrage among the families of martyrs and the opposition.

International Law Must Be Applied

International law possesses the necessary tools to defuse the current crisis. The rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering the preservation of property registers and the safe return of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh are binding. Armenia's accession to the Rome Statute opens the path for International Criminal Court (ICC) investigations into cross-border persecution. Finally, the Swiss Peace Initiative, voted by the Swiss Parliament to establish a direct negotiation forum between Baku and the legitimate representatives of the Artsakh exiles, offers a concrete political way out.

The European Centre for Law and Justice solemnly calls upon UN member states to break the cycle of economic complicity. It is imperative to activate emergency measures:

• The immediate freezing of any extensions to energy and gas contracts with Ilham Aliyev's administration until the 20 political hostages are released.
• The conditioning of international aid on the unconditional opening of Nagorno-Karabakh territory to UNESCO and Committee Against Torture evaluation missions.
• The launching of independent judicial inquiries within European parliaments to expose the corruption networks through which Baku buys the silence of democracies.

Allowing ethnic cleansing to become a negotiable fait accompli on the altar of energy pragmatism will not bring peace to the Caucasus. It will only signal to authoritarian regimes that international law has a price, and that Europe is ready to pay it at the going rate per cubic meter of gas.