The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court warned that Azerbaijan is preparing genocide against ethnic Armenians in its Nagorno-Karabakh region and called for the UN Security Council to bring the matter before the international tribunal.
A report by Luis Moreno Ocampo issued Tuesday said Azerbaijan's blockade of the only road leading from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh seriously impedes food, medical supplies, and other essentials to the region of about 120,000 people.
“There is a reasonable basis to believe that a genocide is being committed,” Ocampo's report said, noting that a UN convention defines genocide as including "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”
Nagorno-Karabakh is a region within Azerbaijan that came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by the Armenian military in separatist fighting that ended in 1994. Armenian forces also took control of substantial territory around the region.
A government representative in Azerbaijan dismissed the report from Ocampo, who was the ICC’s first prosecutor, saying it “contains unsubstantiated allegations and accusations.”
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