The Center of Analysis of International Relations has just published my latest on the continuing impasse and discussion on Baku’s demand to remove the current preamble to Armenia’s Constitution that I’ve been consistently covering since late January last year. This has also includes pieces mentioning attempts by various commentators in Armenia and Azerbaijan including AIR’s Farid Shafiyev.
Earlier this month I was briefly interviewed by Nazrin Babayeva from Report.Az. It was published in two parts so included below is the full text in whole.
Since the exodus last fall of over 100,000 ethnic Armenians from the once disputed but now dissolved territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, many have believed a resolution to the three-decade-long conflict to be within reach. Up until Azerbaijan’s operation to disarm the remnants of the breakaway region’s military last September, the region was internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but was governed and populated by ethnic Armenians.
Early last month, Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, announced that an agreement to normalize relations with Armenia is unlikely to be signed unless it changes its constitution. Specifically, this would mean removing a controversial preamble that references the 1990 Declaration of Independence, which in turn is based on the 1989 Joint Statement on the “Reunification of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Mountainous Region of Karabakh.”
In June, Baku reiterated its demand that any peace agreement must explicitly address changes in the Armenian Constitution, including the removal of what Azerbaijan and Türkiye perceive as territorial claims against them.
Despite progress between Armenia and Azerbaijan over border delimitation and demarcation, another issue threatens to hinder the signing of a long-awaited agreement to normalise relations. Baku now demands that Yerevan first removes from its constitution a controversial preamble referencing the 1990 Declaration of Independence.
On January 18, six years after the street protests that brought him to power in 2018, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan raised the issue of reforming the country’s constitution during a meeting with the Armenian Ministry of Justice. The constitution was originally introduced under Levon Ter-Petrosyan in 1995 and controversially amended under his successors, Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan.
Reforming the constitution of any nation is inherently challenging, but in Armenia it has always proven particularly controversial. Introduced by referendum in 1995 under then President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the current constitution has been amended twice by his successors – Robert Kocharyan in 2005 and Serzh Sargsyan in 2015.