Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and Armenian rights activists on Friday called for the "immediate and unconditional" release of 55 Armenian prisoners from Nagorno-Karabakh "held hostage" by Azerbaijan, during a press conference at City Hall.
According to Anne Hidalgo, who was accompanied by the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo and MEP François-Xavier Bellamy, they are political prisoners, including eight former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, arrested during the 2020 conflict and more recently in September during Azerbaijan's lightning offensive.
These prisoners, detained in Baku, "have had contact twice with their families, but since then nothing," lamented Mourad Papazian, co-president of the Coordinating Council of Armenian Organizations of France (CCAF). "So, we don't know in what conditions of psychological and physical pressure they are being held today." "These hostages need international protection because there is not a single Azerbaijani judge who would release them, no one can contradict President Aliyev," Ocampo said, citing a 2022 U.S. State Department report mentioning that Azerbaijan does not have an independent judiciary and "prisoners are tortured and killed». François-Xavier Bellamy called for an end to the gas deal, which he considers "intolerable" between Europe and Azerbaijan and to seize the assets in France of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
No peace treaty
Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought two wars for control of this mountainous enclave, one in the 1990s when the USSR broke up, the other in the autumn of 2020, won by Baku. A Russian-brokered ceasefire was signed in 2020, but no peace treaty has come to fruition despite attempts at negotiations. Tensions have redoubled between the two countries since Azerbaijani forces recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh last September, which had been in the hands of Armenian separatists for three decades.
More than 100,000 of the 120,000 people officially registered have fled to Armenia. "A genocidal process is underway" against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, said Anne Hidalgo, who said she was basing herself on a report submitted in July by Luis Moreno Ocampo "very solidly substantiated establishing Azerbaijan's willingness to go as far as genocide against the 120,000 Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh in order to (...) erase all traces of Armenian settlement, heritage and culture."