Siranush Sahakian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that Azerbaijani authorities had objected to continued provision of such information in a petition filed in the Strasbourg tribunal in July. Sahakian said the resulting ECHR order is important despite what she described as Baku’s false reports on the prisoners sent to Strasbourg earlier.
The Azerbaijani authorities until recently allowed representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to periodically to visit the captives to inspect their detention conditions, inquire about their health and arrange phone calls between them and their families. They most recently did so in June.
The ICRC lost that exclusive access after being forced to end its mission in Azerbaijan on September 3. The captives’ families are now even more concerned about their treatment.
Sahakian said last month that some of the prisoners claimed to have tried to commit suicide in phone calls with their relatives in Armena. The human rights lawyer refused to name them, saying only that they do not include any of the eight former political and military leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh standing trial in Azerbaijan.
Some of the relatives hoped to meet with the head of Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS), Andranik Simonian, after he visited Baku later in September to attend an international conference. The NSS did not report such a meeting. Nor did it say whether Simonian discussed the fate of the prisoners with Azerbaijani officials. The NSS chief also heads an Armenian interagency commission on prisoners and missing persons.
Prospects for the release anytime soon of the captives remain uncertain even after the initialing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty in Washington on August 8. Neither the treaty nor a separate declaration signed by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian at the White House commits Baku to freeing them. This fact fueled more claims by Pashinian’s domestic critics that he is doing little to secure the prisoners’ release.
Pashinian did not explicitly demand their release or even use the word “prisoners” or “captives” when he addressed the UN General Assembly and the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly in recent days. He spoke instead of the importance of “addressing the problem of persons imprisoned as a result of protracted conflict.” Echoing Armenian opposition leaders’ statements, Sahakian suggested that Pashinian is afraid of angering Aliyev.