We have managed with Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev to have a direct, candid, and constructive dialogue.

The Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, on Thursday stated the aforementioned, as he responded to a query by a delegate at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), in Strasbourg, France.

“Unfortunately, we still do not have a common understanding of the details and mechanisms for resolving the Karabakh issue, but we have been able to create a candid atmosphere for a constructive dialogue,” he added. “We believe a number of essential issues need to be addressed today to institutionalize the peace agenda, and one of them is to have the OSCE Minsk Group format work as effectively as it can, which implies the participation of the representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh in the peace process. It is hard to imagine how we can resolve the conflict without the main party to the conflict being involved in the peace.”

He said many people might not know this, but there was a direct meeting between a leader of Nagorno-Karabakh and a leader of Azerbaijan in the past, so there is precedent.

“Elected AS (2019) CR16 23 representatives from Nagorno-Karabakh were almost always involved in the negotiations,” he added. “It is said that that was the case was up to 1998, but I can tell you that up until 2018 Karabakh’s representatives were present in the peace talks. Let us not forget that Robert Kocharyan before he became President of Armenia was elected president of the republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. Thereafter Serzh Sargsyan represented Armenia but he was also one of the leaders of Karabakh. So Nagorno-Karabakh was represented at the negotiating table throughout the negotiations, and it is our objective today to create the conditions for this dialogue between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan not to be interrupted. This is an important undertaking.”