Pursuant to Article 30 (1) of the “Law on Human Rights Ombudsman” of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), the Artsakh Ombudsman’s Staff has published the annual report on the 2020 activities, as well as the state of protection of human rights and freedoms. Armenian News-NEWS.am has learned this from the office of the Artsakh ombudsman (human rights defender)

In 2020, the Ombudsman’s Staff received 377 applications from 481 persons on social security, labour, proper administration, property, electoral and a number of other rights. It should be noted that the total number of applications does not include the hundreds of applications received during the hostilities as due to the difficulties of the situation, it was not possible to maintain proper statistics.

If before the [recent Artsakh] war the applications mainly referred to the abovementioned rights, during and after the war they covered the rights to life and health of servicemen and civilians, receiving information about the missing, evacuation of civilians, social security, labour and other rights and issues.  

The Annual report also details the results of the fact-finding mission initiated by the Ombudsman and the reports based on them to document the human rights violations as a result of the large-scale aggression unleashed by Azerbaijan against the people of Artsakh on September 27, 2020.

By the report, the Ombudsman draws the attention of the competent authorities to the existing issues in the legislation and law enforcement practice (social security right, property right, health care right, right to fair trial, right to free movement, children’s rights, disability rights, detainees’ rights and a number of other areas), coming up with tangible proposals to address these issues.

The Ombudsman expresses his readiness to cooperate with the state authorized bodies and the civil society in order to solve the mentioned problems.