Azerbaijan on Thursday slammed its archrival Armenia for “misleading” claims in their decades-old territorial disputes.
Allegations by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan about territorial claims in Azerbaijan’s Constitution “have no ground and are misleading the international community,” the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesperson said.
Pashinyan on Wednesday said that the Azerbaijani Constitution lays claims to Armenian territory.
“This allegation is a futile balancing act and an attempt to overlook/ignore the claims towards the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan,” Aykhan Hajizada said on X.
Hajizada said the Constitution of Azerbaijan does not contain any claim to lands of neighboring countries. But Armenia’s body of laws aims for a “reunification of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh,” an Azerbaijani region, and calls some territories of Türkiye as “western Armenia.”
The spokesperson said Armenia’s legislations demonstrate that it has never recognized Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan.
“Therefore, statements that Armenia recognizes the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan have no legal ground until Armenia makes changes to its Constitution and renounces all the legal and political acts that reflect its claim to Azerbaijan,” he stressed.
The territorial claim dispute has been one of the main stumbling blocks in peace talks between the ex-Soviet republics.
Relations between the neighbors have been tense since 1991, when the Armenian military illegally occupied Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, and seven adjacent regions.
Most of the territory was liberated by Azerbaijan during the war in the fall of 2020, which ended after a Russian-brokered peace agreement opened the door to ongoing normalization and demarcation talks.
After a series of slow-moving negotiations, Azerbaijan rushed in troops last year September and swiftly seized back Karabakh, whose entire population of nearly 120,000 people returned to Armenia after rejecting a reintegration program Baku offered.
Baku and Yerevan are currently working to sign a peace treaty, which they say is 80% complete, including border delineation, to end the decadeslong dispute over the enclave.
The talks have been tense, with both nations in recent weeks accusing the other of not being interested in signing a treaty to end their more than three decades of conflict that started before the two countries gained their independence from Moscow.
Baku rejects signing a deal with provisions “that have yet to be agreed upon.”
Azerbaijan has said Armenia must change its Constitution to remove indirect references to Karabakh’s “independence” before signing a peace treaty.
Earlier this year, Armenia withdrew from several Azerbaijani villages it controlled since the early 1990s as part of the peace process.