ArmInfo. The two international law principles that are constantly used within the Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh case are self- determination and territorial integrity. Edita Gzoyan, deputy director for scientific works of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, shares a similar opinion.
The expert stated that territorial integrity and self-determination of nations are two principles of the international law, which raise many debates because of a supposed contradiction.
"Meanwhile, territorial integrity refers to the protection of an independent state's territory from aggression of other states, while self-determination is defined as a right of nations to freely decide their sovereignty and political status without external compulsion or outside interference. Thus, territorial integrity is closely connected with a basic order in interstate relations among sovereign independent states, while self-determination is a fundamental human right and refers to the relations between an independent state and a people," she said.
At the same time she noted, that according to modern international law the right to self- determination did not involve necessarily a right to independence, but rather the recognition of "every right accorded to minorities under international convention as well as national and international guarantees consistent with the principles of international law" in other words - internal self-determination.
"However, once the latter guarantee fails, the people are entitled to the right to external self-determination, that is - unilateral secession. The right to secession arises when the oppression and discrimination cross a certain threshold that threatens the survival of the group. Secession as a response to gross human rights violations has been termed as remedial secession - "secession accomplished in an attempt to remediate an ongoing situation."
State and judicial practice demonstrates the existence of the right to remedial secession conditioned upon some requirements. The seeds of remedial secession and its requirements have been planted in a famous land Islands Case. Here the International Committee of Jurists "articulated the following requirements for justifiable secession when the parent state opposes it: 1) those wishing to secede were "a people"; 2) they were subject to serious violations of human rights at the hands of the parent state; and 3) no other remedies were available to them."
The fact that the populations of Bangladesh (East Pakistan), Kosovo, East Timor and South Sudan was subjected to an excessive violence and in some cases, genocide, was another crucial moment for the implementation of the right of remedial succession and recognition of the legitimacy of their independence by the international community. Given the violent history of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, persistent persecutions, massacres and discrimination against the Armenians of the region, more recently the 2020 war and the violence against the civilians, persistent eradication of Armenian cultural heritage in order to erase any trace of Armenian presence and the rhetoric from Baku, the threat of ethnic cleansing and nowadays genocide by attrition perpetrated by the Azeri government against the people of Artsakh, are all facts of gross human rights violation and an attempted genocide.
Thus, if considering the Artsakh issue within the self-determination territorial integrity dilemma, a remedial secession of Artsakh from an autocratic, totalitarian Azerbaijan is not only in full conformity with international law, both explicitly and normatively, but it is also the only viable solution to avoid a new genocide against the indigenous Armenian population," Gzoyan concludes.