Presented by Maria Gevorgyan, a lawyer at the Center for Truth and Justice (CFTJ).
Excellencies, dear colleagues,
Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this critical dialogue. I speak today on behalf of the Center for Truth and Justice, an international organization carrying the voices of those who have already paid the price of unchecked aggression.
Over the years, my colleagues and I have documented hundreds of first-hand testimonies from victims and survivors of the most egregious war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh by the Azerbaijani regime. We have heard accounts of legs and ears being cut off, hours of inhumane treatment in detention facilities, and the loss of consciousness from torture inflicted on ethnic Armenians. Victims have described the constant, paralysing fear that every second could be their last. We have documented executions and beheadings. And we have documented the forced displacement of 120,000 ethnic Armenians. Most of these atrocities were made possible by sustained acts of aggression.
This aggression is now spilling over into Armenia itself. In recent months, we have documented incidents where Azerbaijani forces opened fire on Armenian villages. Eyewitnesses tell us of children jolted awake at night by the sound of tracer bullets cutting through the dark.
