Pashinyan Accuses Baku of Using Illegal Methods to Extract Testimony from Artsakh Leaders
A military court in Baku on Monday rejected a motion made by the defense attorneys last week to change the detention status of the Artsakh leaders currently facing bogus charges in Azerbaijan to house arrest.
State-appointed defense lawyers representing former Artsakh presidents and other government officials petitioned the court last week to allow their clients to enter house arrest instead of detention in prison.
Azerbaijani forces captured and detained Artsakh’s former presidents Arkady Ghukasian, Bako Sahakian and Arayik Harutyunyan in September 2023 after launching a brutal attack on Artsakh that forcibly displaced its Armenian population. Also captured and detained were Artsakh’s former foreign minister David Vardanyan, Artsakh’s Parliament Speaker Davit Ishkhanyan, as well as high-ranking officials of the Artsakh Army, Levon Mnatsakanyan and David Manukyan.
Azerbaijani media reported that all of the leaders, except former Harutyunyan, petitioned the court for the change in their detention status.
Artsakh’s former state minister Ruben Vardanyan, who was taken captive at the same time as the other leaders in September 2023, is being tried separately.
The court had allowed a continuance to Vardanyan’s defense team to study the charges and had scheduled the trial to resume on Monday.
According to Azerbaijani press reports, Vardanyan’s trial resumed on Monday in another courtroom in the same military court complex in Baku.
The court rejected another motion for continuance by Vardanyan’s state-appointed defense attorney.
Both trials are set to resume on February 8.
During an interview with Armenia’s Public Television on Saturday, Prime Minster Nikol Pashinyan said that intelligence obtained by his government indicated that the authorities in Baku are using illegal methods against the Artsakh leaders to extract testimony.
He said that banned psychoactive methods were being used by Baku to force testimony from the Artsakh leaders in order to “incite regional escalation.”
“That trial will be used against the Republic of Armenia. It is possible that through banned psychoactive methods they will extract from those individuals the kind of testimonies that will be used against the Republic of Armenia in the various ways. We understand this issue very well and very deeply,” Pashinyan said, adding that his government is doing the utmost to address the issue.
Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry, in a statement, denied Pashinyan’s allegations, calling them “baseless and absurd.”
“The rights of and the obligations toward the accused have been properly ensured,” claimed the foreign ministry in its statement, saying that the trial is copiously recorded.
During the Saturday interview, Pashinyan also denied accusations from opposition forces and other circles that his government is ignoring the trials and doing nothing, saying that the Yerevan views the Artsakh leaders as opponents.
“I do not consider anyone there to be my political opponent,” Pashinyan said.
“We realize that what is happening there is not only seriously concerning but will be used and is used for inciting new escalation in the region,” the prime minister said.
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