What the Courts Saw

There is a version of the Artsakh story in which every fact is contested, every claim answered by a counterclaim, until an outside reader gives up and files the whole thing under ancient hatreds. The legal record does not permit that version. Between 1993 and 2025 the United Nations Security Council, the European Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice each examined the conflict and wrote down what they found. The findings do not favor one side uniformly, and they do not need to; what matters is that they exist, in full, in institutions Azerbaijan itself belongs to. Azerbaijan sits in the United Nations. It answers to the Strasbourg court as a member state of the Council of Europe. It ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the treaty under which the ICJ found jurisdiction to hear Armenia's case against it.¹ This essay reads that paper trail in order.

Four resolutions, 1993#

The Security Council spoke four times during the first war, all in 1993, the year the fighting spread outward from Artsakh into the surrounding districts.

Resolution 822 came on 30 April, after Karabakh Armenian forces seized Karvachar, the province between Artsakh and Armenia, in a week-long operation that Human Rights Watch found drove some 60,000 people, mostly Kurdish and other Muslim civilians, from their homes.² The Council unanimously demanded an immediate ceasefire and the "immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces from the Kelbajar district and other recently occupied areas of Azerbaijan," and reaffirmed the inviolability of international borders.³

Resolution 853 followed on 29 July, after the capture and systematic looting of the emptied city of Akna, whose pre-war population had been about 50,000. It condemned "the seizure of the district of Agdam" and demanded withdrawal from all recently occupied areas.⁴ Resolution 874, on 14 October, called for an effective and permanent ceasefire, endorsed the CSCE Minsk Group's "Adjusted timetable" for withdrawal from the recently occupied territories, and urged the parties back to negotiations.⁵ Resolution 884, on 12 November, after the southernmost districts fell, condemned the occupation of what its text calls "the Zangelan district and the city of Goradiz," condemned attacks on civilians, and demanded unilateral withdrawal.⁶

These four texts are the most quoted documents in Azerbaijan's legal case, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. They demand withdrawal and they reaffirm borders. But they are also ceasefire documents. Four times in seven months the Council demanded that the shooting stop, endorsed the Minsk process as the road to a settlement, and attached no enforcement measure to any of it. The war did not end on the Council's terms. It ended in May 1994, when representatives of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh signed the Bishkek Protocol under Russian and CIS parliamentary mediation, a document the Council never drafted.⁷

Mirror images in Strasbourg#

Two decades later the European Court of Human Rights ruled on the displaced of both sides, in twin Grand Chamber judgments issued the same day, 16 June 2015.

In Chiragov and Others v. Armenia (application no. 13216/05), the Court held that Armenia exercised effective control over Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent territory, and that it had violated the property rights of Kurdish applicants displaced from the Kashatagh region, the area the judgment calls the "district of Lachin."⁸ In Sargsyan v. Azerbaijan (no. 40167/06), it held that Azerbaijan had violated the rights of an Armenian displaced from the village of Gulistan.⁹ The paired rulings established mirror-image state responsibility, each state answerable to the displaced of the other side. Azerbaijan cites Chiragov for the finding of Armenian control; Armenians cite Sargsyan for the finding that Azerbaijan owed, and denied, rights to an Armenian it displaced. Both citations are accurate; that is what a court record looks like when the court is real.

Strasbourg also ruled on a case that involved no territory at all. In 2004 Ramil Safarov, an officer of Azerbaijan's army attending a NATO course in Budapest, murdered the sleeping Armenian officer Gurgen Margaryan with an axe and was sentenced to life imprisonment in Hungary. In August 2012 Hungary extradited him to Azerbaijan, where President Aliyev pardoned him the same day; he was promoted and given an apartment and back pay.¹⁰ The European Parliament condemned the pardon and the glorification of the crime.¹¹ In May 2020, in Makuchyan and Minasyan v. Azerbaijan and Hungary, the European Court of Human Rights found that Azerbaijan had violated the Convention by failing to enforce Safarov's sentence.¹²

When the 2020 war began, the court acted within two days. On 29 and 30 September 2020 it granted Armenia's request for interim measures under Rule 39, calling on the states involved to refrain from measures, in particular military action, that might endanger the Convention rights of the civilian population; the measure was treated as addressed to both states and kept in force.¹³

Binding orders from The Hague#

On 16 September 2021 Armenia filed a case against Azerbaijan at the International Court of Justice under CERD.¹ The Court's provisional-measures orders in such a case are legally binding on the parties, not advisory.¹⁴

The first order came on 7 December 2021. The Court ordered Azerbaijan to protect from violence all persons captured in the 2020 conflict who remained in detention, to prevent the incitement of racial hatred against Armenians, and to prevent and punish vandalism and desecration of Armenian cultural heritage.¹⁵

Then came the blockade. On 12 December 2022 demonstrators linked to Azerbaijan's government, presenting themselves as environmental activists, blocked the Berdzor corridor, the single road connecting Artsakh's roughly 120,000 Armenians to Armenia. The Security Council met in emergency session on 20 December, and member states urged that the corridor be reopened.¹⁶ On 22 February 2023, by thirteen votes to two, the ICJ ordered Azerbaijan to "take all measures at its disposal to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions," finding a real and imminent risk of irreparable harm from blocked medical evacuations and shortages of food and medicine.¹⁷ Azerbaijan then installed an official checkpoint on the road in April 2023. Armenia asked the Court to modify its order; on 6 July 2023 the Court declined to modify it and instead reaffirmed it, keeping the binding obligation in force while the corridor remained effectively sealed.¹⁸ On 16 August 2023 the Security Council heard from the UN humanitarian office that the ICRC had been unable to bring assistance through the corridor, or any other route, for several weeks.¹⁹

Thirty-four days after that session Azerbaijan launched its offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh, and within two weeks virtually the entire Armenian population, 100,632 people by the UN agencies' count, had fled to Armenia.²⁰ On 17 November 2023 the ICJ issued a further order requiring Azerbaijan to ensure that persons who left Nagorno-Karabakh after 19 September 2023 and wish to return can do so in a safe, unimpeded and expeditious manner, to ensure that those who remained or returned are free from the use of force or intimidation, and to protect registration, identity and property documents and records.²¹

Azerbaijan then argued that the Court had no business hearing the case at all. On 12 November 2024 the Court rejected its first preliminary objection by sixteen votes to one and its second by fifteen votes to two, and found, by fifteen votes to two, that it has jurisdiction under Article 22 of CERD.¹ It held that the alleged murder, torture, inhuman treatment, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance of ethnic Armenians are capable of constituting violations of the Convention, including in armed conflict. It was equally plain about the limits. Its jurisdiction "is limited by Article 22 of CERD to Armenia's claims under that Convention," so the status of the region, self-determination and the lawfulness of the September 2023 offensive are not before it.²² The case is now on the merits. Azerbaijan filed its Counter-Memorial on time, both parties agreed that a second round of written pleadings was warranted, and by an order of 17 December 2025 the Court fixed 19 October 2026 for Armenia's Reply and 19 August 2027 for Azerbaijan's Rejoinder.²³

What enforcement never came#

Set the orders beside the events and the pattern is plain. The corridor order of February 2023 was binding; the corridor stayed shut. The reaffirmed order of July 2023 was binding; the checkpoint stayed. The blockade ended only when the population it starved was driven out. The return order of November 2023 remains in force; the joint declaration signed in Washington in August 2025 by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and the United States contains no provision on the return of the Karabakh Armenians.²⁴ The heritage measure of December 2021 remains in force; Caucasus Heritage Watch's satellite monitoring documented the eradication of six Armenian heritage sites in late 2022 and early 2023, and its July 2025 report recorded continuing bulldozer damage to two historic Armenian cemeteries and a record seven threatened sites.²⁵

No court in this story commands a police force, and the Security Council, which does, attached no enforcement to its resolutions in 1993 and adopted none at all in 2022 or 2023. That is the honest limit of the record.

It is a limit on enforcement, not on the record itself. A reader who trusts no Armenian source can assemble this entire account from the resolutions of the Security Council, from the judgments of a court Azerbaijan joined by treaty, and from the binding orders of the ICJ issued under a convention Azerbaijan ratified, every one of them produced by a body in which Azerbaijan holds membership. The findings run in both directions, against Armenia in Chiragov and against Azerbaijan in Sargsyan, in Makuchyan and Minasyan, and in every order of the CERD case. What the courts saw is written down, the obligations they imposed have not lapsed, and the file is still open in The Hague.