September 19, 2022 HRC 51st Session: Item 3 - ID with Independent Expert on the enjoyment of all human rights by older persons: Delivered by Ms. Armine Petrosyan, Second Secretary - Embassy of Armenia to Switzerland and Permanent Mission of Armenia to the UN office at Geneva

September 19, 2022 HRC 51st Session: Item 3 - ID with Independent Expert on the enjoyment of all human rights by older persons: Delivered by Ms. Armine Petrosyan, Second Secretary

30 September, 2022

President,

Armenia welcomes the Independent Expert and appreciates the emphasis of her report on situation of older persons deprived from liberty. The older persons are more likely to be subjected to serious human rights violations regardless the context of their deprivation.

According to multiple international reports those Armenian elderly in Nagorno-Karabakh who did not manage to leave their homes during hostilities in autumn 2020 were disproportionately subjected to violence, including extrajudicial executions, beheadings, as well as torture and other ill-treatment while in Azerbaijani detention. According to Amnesty International, older men appear to have been targeted because Azerbaijani soldiers believed they had participated in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict during the 1990s. The videos of these horrendous crimes were posted on the social networks by the perpetrators themselves, who did not cover their faces and openly boasted for the crimes in an obvious atmosphere of impunity.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in its recent concluding observations with regards to the review of Azerbaijan raised concern about “grave human rights violations committed by the Azerbaijani military forces against prisoners of war and other protected persons of Armenian ethnic or national origin”.

I thank you.

MFA RA
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