ArmInfo. In protecting the rights of the people of Artsakh, their right to self-determination has no alternative. Former member of the National Assembly of Armenia, lawyer Taron Simonyan, expressed a similar opinion to ArmInfo.
"In the end, the Artsakh problem is, among other things, the problem of the rights of the population living there. And if the protection of these rights in the current situation is possible only in the event of the reunification of Artsakh with Armenia or the acquisition of independence by Artsakh, then adopting the right to self-determination as the foundation of the policy towards solving this problem has no alternative," he stressed.
Without intending to reinvent the wheel, the lawyer, referring to international law, noted that the rights of the people of Artsakh can and should be protected through the use of the international principle of remedial secessions. Simply because the residents of Artsakh have no other way to protect these rights, for example, as part of modern Azerbaijan.
Assessing this principle of international law as a recognized principle operating within the framework of the right to self-determination, Simonyan expressed an opinion that the Armenian leadership is trying to use this particular legal logic in the negotiation process with Azerbaijan. However, not having a complete understanding of this topic, they very often cause considerable harm to Artsakh with their own statements, which are often incoherent and out of a single context.
" Moreover, it is fundamentally wrong to constantly state that the Artsakh issue is not a matter of territories, but only a matter of rights. The problem of Artsakh is a territorial and legal problem simply because Armenia has always maintained that independent Azerbaijan never had title rights in relation to territories of Artsakh due to the fact that these territories, as well as many territories of the Syunik and Tavush regions, were forcibly separated from Armenia and annexed to Azerbaijan during the Soviet period," the lawyer summed up.