Jared Genser praised the Armenian Foreign Ministry for breaking its silence and criticizing last week the ongoing trials of Vardanyan and seven other former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh captured following the September 2023 Azerbaijani military offensive.
“This was big!” he wrote on X. “There is also so much more PM Nikol Pashinian can do from here to make [their liberation] happen.”
Genser attached to his post a statement listing concrete steps which believes should be taken by the Armenian government. Those include asking the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to send “trial monitors” to Baku, appealing to the United States and the European Union “for their help” and linking the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal with the prisoners’ release.
The lawyer also said: “Prime Minister Pashinian can … issue a public statement that says that the release of the political prisoners and POWs by Azerbaijan is a top priority, that their detentions are politically motivated, and they must be immediately and unconditionally released.”
Pashinian is facing growing domestic criticism for his reluctance to do so. The premier again said at the weekend that Yerevan will harm the prisoners if it acts more forcefully on the issue.
“If we take visible steps, the prisoners may never return home,” Alen Simonian, the Armenian parliament speaker and a key Pashinian ally, claimed on Tuesday.
Critics’ fury with the Armenian government’s stance grew further after Azerbaijani state media released on February 24 images of Vardanyan appearing before a military court in Baku one week after the start of his latest hunger strike. Vardanyan, who briefly served as Karabakh premier from November 2022 to February 2023, looked frail and had apparent bruises on his face. Genser expressed on February 26 serious concern at his client’s “deteriorating health,” saying that Baku must suspend his separate trial.
It is not clear whether the next session of the trial, scheduled for Tuesday morning, took place as planned. Azerbaijani government-controlled news agencies did not report anything about it in the following hours.
Meanwhile, the office of Azerbaijan’s state human rights defender, Sabina Aliyeva, said that she visited Vardanyan and the other former Karabakh leaders in prison. Aliyeva’s visit was reported the day after the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Tuerk, urged Baku to free the Armenian prisoners.
“All those arbitrarily detained in Azerbaijan, including ethnic Armenians, must be released immediately, and fair trial rights must be respected fully,” Tuerk said during a session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.