I have to record that Azerbaijan also continuously violates point 8 of the trilateral declaration of November 2020 on the exchange of prisoners of war, hostages and other detained persons, continuing to detain many citizens of the Republic of Armenia and trying to make this humanitarian issue a subject of petty bargaining, Nikol Pashinyan, Armenian Prime Minister said during a Government sitting on November 10.2022.
“Azerbaijan continuously makes the subject of missing persons an object of speculation, trying to create the impression that only it has that problem, and as if Armenia is unconstructive in the context of solving this humanitarian issue.
Meanwhile, this is an equally urgent and painful problem for the Republic of Armenia. The number of missing persons of the Armenian side from the first Karabakh war is 777, from the 44-day war - 203. We even have 16 missing persons since September 13, and the bodies of these soldiers are in the territories that appeared under Azerbaijani rule, and Azerbaijan is delaying their return to Armenia using all possible methods and fictitious pretexts. And since 2020, the Armenian side has returned to Azerbaijan 130 bodies of the missing persons from the first war and actively continues the work in this direction, which is extremely difficult due to the lack of any data.
As you know, Armenia also made a humanitarian gesture after the 2020 war by handing over to Azerbaijan all the maps of minefields in 7 regions, but Azerbaijan also turned this into an object of aggression and hostility rather than creating an atmosphere of mutual trust”, Pashinyan said.
