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HRC 55th Session: Agenda item 9 – General Debate

28 March, 2024
HRC 55th Session: Agenda item 9 – General Debate
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Delivered by Mr. Hambardzum Minasyan, First Secretary

 

President,

Armenia shares its grave concern with regard to what the UN CERD has characterized as an “incitement to racial hatred and the propagation of racist stereotypes against persons of Armenian national or ethnic origin by public figures and government officials” of Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijani public has been consistently injected with the idea of racial inferiority of Armenians, as well as with repetitive calls to violence, brutality and annihilation. Armenians are described in Azerbaijani school textbooks as “willy and corrupt” and “infidels in black clothes.”

On the other hand, the books of a renowned Azerbaijani novelist were burned on the streets because he was preaching for peace with Armenia. The special procedure mandate holders issued communications on this, as well as other cases of anti-Armenian racism in Azerbaijan. 

As an integral part of this rhetoric, Azerbaijan bases its territorial claims against the Republic of Armenia on distorted historical narratives that further fuel anti-Armenian hatred in the Azerbaijani society.

The hate speech can be a precursor of atrocity crimes. This is what happened recently in Nagorno-Karabakh. If remain unchallenged, it can lead to new atrocities committed against Armenia. 

Thank you.   

 

Right of Reply

 

President,

 We exercise our right of reply to the statement delivered by Azerbaijan.

The International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to prevent anti-Armenian incitement and promotion of racial hatred, including by the officials and public institutions. Azerbaijan has failed to implement this binding ruling of the Court.   

The anti-Armenian hate speech has dominated public discourse in Azerbaijan. Recently a parliamentary committee of Azerbaijan adopted a statement which referred to Armenians as “a cancerous tumor of Europe”. High-ranking officials have been using most inflammatory, derogatory language in relation to Armenians, such as “beasts,” “mice” and “dogs” and other forms of dehumanization. Animalization is the most common form of dehumanization in atrocity crimes, to deny victims their humanity in order to justify the atrocious violence against them. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance has observed that “an entire generation of Azerbaijanis has now grown up listening to this hateful rhetoric.”

During the war in Nagorno-Karabakh this anti-Armenian hatred has manifested itself in the atrocity crimes committed by Azerbaijan in the ugliest forms. Azerbaijan erected a Trophy Park in its capital to glorify those atrocities. As the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe stated “[t]his kind of display can only further intensify and strengthen longstanding hostile sentiments and hate speech, and multiply and promote manifestations of intolerance.”

It is noteworthy that discrimination and the identity-based crimes committed by Azerbaijan have also been recognized by the European Court of Human Rights on the cases of torture and killing of ethnic Armenians.

The UN Human Rights Committee has noted with concern that in Azerbaijan “foreigners with Armenian surnames have been prevented from entering the State party regardless of their nationality.” Azerbaijan issued a postal stamp displaying a disinfection specialist standing over a map of Nagorno-Karabakh and fumigating it. The racist nature of the stamp was obvious. Hence, the Universal Postal Union decided not to register it.

The European Parliament acknowledged that “the erasure of the Armenian cultural heritage is part of a wider pattern of a systematic, state-level policy of Armenophobia, historical revisionism and hatred towards Armenians promoted by the Azerbaijani authorities, including dehumanization, the glorification of violence and territorial claims against the Republic of Armenia which threaten peace and security in the South Caucasus.”

 

I thank you.

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