Opinion: remedial secession of Artsakh from autocratic Azerbaijan is  only viable solution to avoid new genocide against indigenous  Armenian population

ArmInfo.  The two international law principles that are constantly used within the Artsakh/Nagorno  Karabakh case are self- determination and territorial integrity.  Edita Gzoyan, deputy director for scientific works of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, shares a similar opinion.

The expert stated that territorial integrity and self-determination  of nations are two principles of the international law, which raise  many debates because of a supposed contradiction. 

"Meanwhile, territorial integrity refers to the protection of an  independent state's territory from aggression of other states, while  self-determination is defined as a right of nations to freely decide  their sovereignty and political status without external compulsion or  outside interference. Thus, territorial integrity is closely  connected with a basic order in interstate relations among sovereign  independent states, while self-determination is a fundamental human  right and refers to the relations between an independent state and a  people," she said.

At the same time she noted, that according to modern international  law the right to self- determination did not involve necessarily a  right to independence, but rather the recognition of "every right  accorded to minorities under international convention as well as  national and international guarantees consistent with the principles  of international law" in other words - internal self-determination. 

"However, once the latter guarantee fails, the people are entitled to  the right to external self-determination, that is - unilateral  secession. The right to secession arises when the oppression and  discrimination cross a certain threshold that threatens the survival  of the group. Secession as a response to gross human rights  violations has been termed as remedial secession - "secession  accomplished in an attempt to remediate an ongoing situation."

State and judicial practice demonstrates the existence of the right  to remedial secession conditioned upon some requirements. The seeds  of remedial secession and its requirements have been planted in a  famous  land Islands Case. Here the International Committee of  Jurists "articulated the following requirements for justifiable  secession when the parent state opposes it: 1) those wishing to  secede were "a people"; 2) they were subject to serious violations of  human rights at the hands of the parent state; and 3) no other  remedies were available to them."

The fact that the populations of Bangladesh (East Pakistan), Kosovo,  East Timor and South Sudan was subjected to an excessive violence and  in some cases, genocide, was another crucial moment for the  implementation of the right of remedial succession and recognition of  the legitimacy of their independence by the international community.   Given the violent history of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,  persistent persecutions, massacres and discrimination against the  Armenians of the region, more recently the 2020 war and the violence  against the civilians, persistent eradication of Armenian cultural  heritage in order to erase any trace of Armenian presence and the  rhetoric from Baku, the threat of ethnic cleansing and nowadays  genocide by attrition perpetrated by the Azeri government against the  people of Artsakh, are all facts of gross human rights violation and  an attempted genocide. 

Thus, if considering the Artsakh issue within the self-determination  territorial integrity dilemma, a remedial secession of Artsakh from  an autocratic, totalitarian Azerbaijan is not only in full conformity  with international law, both explicitly and normatively, but it is  also the only viable solution to avoid a new genocide against the  indigenous Armenian population," Gzoyan  concludes.