© AP
Armenia and Azerbaijan will submit their long-running dispute to the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands, on Monday.
The neighboring countries accuse each other of ethnic cleansing and violating the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Lawyers from both countries will spend two weeks putting forward their interpretations of international law.
In 2021, Armenia took its neighbor Azerbaijan to the International Court of Justice. According to Armenia, Azerbaijan has been violating the human rights of ethnic Armenians for years. Armenia cited the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh as an example. Yerevan lost control of swaths of land in and around that enclave, which is traditionally home to many ethnic Armenians but is recognized as Azerbaijani territory. A week later, Baku in turn filed a case against Yerevan at the International Court of Justice with a similar accusation.
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars over Nagorno-Karabakh: the first in the 1990s, the second in 2020. The latter broke out on September 27 and lasted until November 9, 2020. More than 6,500 people were killed that fall. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian was forced to accept a Russian-backed ceasefire that required Armenia to cede large parts of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and disputed areas in Azerbaijan surrounding the enclave. Those areas were under Armenian control for almost twenty years.