BRUSSELS — Armenian, French and Azerbaijani leaders Nikol Pashinyan, Emmanuel Macron and Ilham Aliyev had a meeting in Brussels, on the sidelines of the Eastern Partnership Summit, the Armenian government said in a Facebook post.

“A trilateral meeting of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, French President Emmanuel Macron and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was held in Brussels at the initiative of the French side,” the Armenian government said.

During a December 14 meeting with European Council President Charles Michel Prime Minister Pashinyan and President Aliyev reconfirmed that key commitments undertaken in the framework of the two trilateral statements of 9 November 2020 and 11 January 2021 would be honoured and that understandings reached in Sochi on 26 November 2021 should be built upon.

President Aliyev and Prime Minister Pashinyan agreed also that in the context of the planned launch of negotiations on the delimitation and demarcation of the state border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, further tangible steps will need to be taken to reduce tensions on the ground to ensure a conducive atmosphere for the talks.

President Michel called on both Yerevan and Baku to actively engage in good faith and to work towards de-escalation. He stressed that ensuring the appropriate distancing of forces is an essential element of incident prevention. He said the EU will make available an expert mission/consultative group to support the border delimitation and demarcation issues by providing technical assistance to both countries.

2 comments
  1. Quote: “President Michel called on both Yerevan and Baku to actively engage in good faith and to work towards de-escalation.”

    Does this also includes Armenia’s rights and (un)written rules of self-defense?

    How far can an attacked country go in defending its territory, civilians and other civil, cultural and religious objects?

    A comparison towards Criminal Law, a person may defend himself against an attacker in such a way that the attacker may be neutralized.

    The defense may be proportional to the attacker’s violence.

    This means that the force used in defense will be more extreme than the force used by the attacker.

    In Law of Warfare the same principle applies, because the attacked party is only concerned with one thing, namely hold the line of defense and winning the fight by neutralizing the enemy. Losing is not an option!

    The Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) War that started September 27, 2020 and where Azerbaijan turned out to be the attacking aggressor with the help of another aggressor Turkey and the deployment of thousands of Syrian / Afghan and Pakistani jihadi mercenaries flown in can be seen as a clear case example, one of which we have seen many in the history of mankind. The winner decides and the loser bows.

    We will not consider the Constitutional Law here, since this no longer applies when war breaks out.

    The attacking parties used all permitted and prohibited means of war and tactics to win the war. Despite all convictions and international treaties, laws and regulations, everything was trampled on by the aggressors.

    Going back to the example concerns Criminal Law and the right of the attacked citizen to be able to defend himself against the attacker by all means, it can be stated that given the method of warfare by Azerbaijan (bombing civilians, civil and religious objects with unauthorized weaponry such as cluster and phosphorus weapons), the military authorities and the Defence Army on the ground of Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh could and should have defended themselves with the same brutal, radical and destructive force as their attackers.

    The choice would have been legitimate within written and unwritten law of war, because losing is not an option for the attacked party.

    On balance, this means that the defending party must adopt the same and preferably even heavier methods in order to win the war, or at least not lose it. Because once again it has become apparent that all international treaties and laws and regulations have contributed nothing to ending or keeping within the reasonable frameworks of the Law of War.

    Surviving a war can only be done by applying even more brutal, radical and / or extreme means than the attacking aggressor. Hold the line of defense and win such wars requires very nasty and extreme countermeasures.

    And an attack from defense is of a completely different order than from offensive aggression.

  2. Exactly correct, Robert Dekker…. The law must apply to both sides. And if one side (Azerbaijan) does not comply with international law, then why should the attacked party, the defenders of their own sovereign land (Armenia)?

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