EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus Peter Semneby, who is on an official visit to Baku, held a meeting with representatives of the so-called Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh. During the meeting Mr. Semneby reported that his aim is to study the community’s position on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, as well as on the negotiations within the OSCE Minsk Group.

The EU official underlined the necessity of return of forcibly displaced Azerbaijanis, as this humanitarian problem is a serious obstacle to the development of the strategically important region, South Caucasus. However, Mr. Semneby did not speak of the hundreds of thousands of Armenian refugees from Baku, Kirovabad and Sumgait.

The EU official stated that two factors must be considered in a peace agreement if it is signed: Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and return of refugees to their homes, the APA News Agency reports.

Thus the EU official actually made a statement running counter to the repeated statements by the leaders of the OSCE MG co-chairing states – Russia, France and the U.S. – who underlined the three fundamental principles of settlement: territorial integrity, peoples’ right to self-determination and nonuse of force or threat of force. If Azeri journalists do not misquote Mr. Semneby, he actually singled out the first principle.