Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry published the text of the peace agreement with Armenia, initialed last week during a trilateral meeting in Washington between President Ilham Aliyev, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and US President Donald Trump.
The agreement, formally titled the “Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and Inter-State Relations between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Armenia,” is founded on a shared commitment to achieving lasting peace in the region, to be pursued through the development of inter-state relations and the promotion of good-neighborly ties.
Seventeen articles in the document address key aspects of rapprochement between the two countries, including:
- Mutual recognition of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and borders
- Renunciation of any present and future territorial claims
- Commitment to non-use of force
- Commitment to non-interference in internal affairs
- Establishment of diplomatic relations
- Negotiations on border delimitation and demarcation
- Security and confidence-building measures, prohibition of third-party military deployments on the border
- Cooperation against intolerance, extremism, separatism, and terrorism
- Resolution of missing persons cases from past conflicts
- Development of economic, transit, transport, environmental, humanitarian, and cultural cooperation
- Safeguarding compatibility with existing international obligations
- Prohibition on invoking domestic law to avoid compliance
- Creation of a bilateral commission to oversee implementation
- Mechanisms for peaceful dispute settlement
- Withdrawal of pre-existing legal disputes
- Procedures for the agreement’s entry into force
- Equal authenticity of Azerbaijani, Armenian, and English texts, with English prevailing in case of divergence
The full and exact text of the document is available here.
Articles 1, 2, 3, 6 and 10 reiterate the five basic principles submitted by Azerbaijan to Armenia for the establishment of mutual relations in March 2022.
The agreement was initialed by the Foreign Ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia during the peace summit hosted by US President Donald Trump in Washington on August 8.
“We acknowledged the need to continue further actions to achieve the signing and ultimate ratification of the Agreement, and emphasized the importance of maintaining and strengthening peace between our two countries,” the sides reaffirmed in a joint declaration issued on the outcomes of the Washington meeting.
In a post-meeting press talk, President Aliyev lauded the initialed agreement as a historic achievement that has already brought peace to the region.
“We can consider that a lasting peace has already come to our region. I believe that this is an issue of special importance for Azerbaijan, Armenia, and indeed the entire region,” he stated,
The agreement addresses one of the main obstacles to the peace: “The parties confirm that they do not have any territorial claims to each other and shall not raise any such claims in the future”.
The peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan is surfacing following decades of conflict over the latter’s Karabakh (Garabagh) region. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Armenia launched a military offensive against Azerbaijan. By the time a ceasefire was reached in 1994, Armenia had occupied around 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory. Over 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed, and one million were expelled from those lands in a brutal ethnic cleansing policy conducted by Armenia.
The situation changed in 2020, when Azerbaijan reclaimed much of the territory following a 44-day war. The war ended in a tripartite statement signed on November 10, 2020, by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia. Under the statement, Armenia also returned the occupied Aghdam, Kalbajar, and Lachin districts to Azerbaijan.
On September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan launched a one-day local anti-terrorist operation to neutralize the remaining illegal Armenian armed groups in the Karabakh region. By September 20, Armenian separatist forces agreed to disarm. On September 28, 2023, the illegal Armenian separatist regime in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan announced its self-dissolution.
