Question: On 19 September 2024 the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress held a hearing titled “Human Rights in Azerbaijan Since the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh,” where speakers raised multiple allegations against Azerbaijan. How would you comment on this anti-Azerbaijani event in the U.S. Congress?

Answer: This is another manifestation of how some groups in the U.S. Congress openly misrepresent the situation in Azerbaijan under the disguise of the human rights, while openly demonstrating disrespect to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

Unfortunately, such one-sided and biased events organized by the members of the U.S. Congress who are being guided by their internal considerations and personal gains much more than the U.S. national security interests, have long become a usual business for the U.S. Congress. Moreover, the participation of representatives of the former separatist regime in the hearing goes beyond all the imaginations, since the same Congressmen, who have organized this hearing are presenting themselves as ardent supporters of respect towards the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations.

Such an event that openly distorts and falsifies all the facts related to Azerbaijan is aimed at deteriorating Azerbaijan-United States relations.

Azerbaijan’s anti-terror measures of last year were in full compliance with international law, including international humanitarian law, and Azerbaijan has never targeted the civilian population. On the contrary, the military aggression and almost 30 years of Armenia’s occupation of Azerbaijan’s sovereign territories where large-scale ethnic cleansing and massacres were committed against Azerbaijanis, religious and cultural monuments of Azerbaijan were razed to the ground, have never been condemned by the U.S. Congress. Unlike Armenia, Azerbaijan has repeatedly called for coexistence and cooperation between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and has assured that the Armenians could be provided all the rights and benefits, and enjoy safety and security as citizens of Azerbaijan.

At the same time, it is alarming to see framing the situation in our region as a confrontation in religious terms, which is detrimental to peace-building and reconciliation.

Moreover, claims at the hearing about the human rights situation in Azerbaijan expressed by some people and organizations that are under the payroll of the Armenian diaspora are null and void, and we categorically condemn such statements. It would be more appropriate for them to focus on violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms in Armenia that they patronage, including cases of the deaths in prison of persons arrested as a result of political persecution, as well as oppression of politicians and their family members.

The so-called “Artsakh” referred in the hearing was nothing than an illegal entity established in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan by Armenia as a result of military occupation and ethnic cleansing of around 750,000 Azerbaijani civilians from the formerly occupied territories of Azerbaijan. Similarly, misrepresentation of the geographic name of a part of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory of Karabakh region as being “Artsakh” is a clear violation of the principles and procedures for international standardization of geographical names, as well as alteration of standards of use of national and foreign geographic names by the U.S. Government authorities approved by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), as required by the US Public Law 80-242 (1947).

We call on the U.S. Congress leadership to prevent such actions from undermining the bilateral Azerbaijan-U.S. relations and expect the Department of State, as an agency overseeing the implementation of the foreign policy, to take appropriate measures in the U.S. Congress against such events hijacked by Armenian lobby groups.