We are No One: How Impunity for Three Years of Atrocities is Erasing Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians
August 2024 (remastered; originally published December 2023)
Executive Summary
In September 2023, Azerbaijani forces completed the ethnic cleansing of the entire population Nagorno-Karabakh's entire population.
A full year earlier in September 2022, the University Network for Human Rights (University Network or UNHR) issued a statement calling for the protection of vulnerable communities in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. We warned,
In the absence of accountability for the violations committed during and in the aftermath of the 44-Day War in 2020, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Russia may well allow the situation to degenerate into wholesale ethnic cleansing and slaughter of civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh, convinced that the world will shrug its shoulders and move on.
Again, three weeks before Azerbaijan’s final and decisive assault on Nagorno-Karabakh, we pleaded, “the window to prevent yet another collective failure to live up to ‘never again’ is closing.”
When the University Network began documenting human rights abuses following the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War three years ago, our initial conclusion was not about the risk of ethnic cleansing nor genocide. Instead, we began preparing a report that would demonstrate that human rights violations were ongoing despite the ceasefire agreement that ended the war in November 2020. However, events unfolded in real time as we continued to visit the region, interview victims and witnesses, analyze data, and publish statements, reports, and op-eds cataloging the abuses we had documented. By our fourth fact-finding trip in July 2023, our understanding of the situation and thus, our conclusion, had evolved. The warning signs of ethnic cleansing and genocide were too many and too clear to ignore. We and others rushed to mobilize the international community, issuing a briefing paper, presenting a submission to the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, and conducting real-time monitoring of Azerbaijan’s decisive takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh and the mass exodus of ethnic Armenians in September 2023.
This report, We are No One: How Impunity for Three Years of Atrocities is Erasing Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenians, collates the findings of this multi-year research by the University Network for Human Rights, in collaboration with students, lawyers, and academics from the Harvard Law School Student Advocates for Human Rights, Oxford University, UCLA Law School Promise Institute for Human Rights, Wesleyan University Department of Earth & Environmental Science, Wesleyan University’s Intensive Undergraduate Program in Human Rights Advocacy, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, and Yale Lowenstein Human Rights Project. In it, we make evident the scale, continuous nature, and overt genocidal character of the abuses that we and others have been documenting since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War through the present day.
Our research uncovered evidence that since the November 9, 2020 ceasefire agreement, Azerbaijan has committed widespread rights abuses against ethnic Armenians within Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia that we have divided into seven categories: arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, unlawful killings, incitement to hatred, attacks on cultural heritage, and forced displacement. Many of the violations still require investigation and accountability, even as their circumstances have been overshadowed by the events of September 2023.
These abuses began during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, during which Azerbaijani and Armenian forces engaged in full-scale combat in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. Rights violations continued unabated after the ceasefire agreement that formally ended active combat. By the conclusion of the 2020 war, Azerbaijan had assumed control of a significant portion of Nagorno-Karabakh. Scenes from the towns that had been overtaken foreshadowed what was to come: No Armenians remained in those areas; if they had not fled before their villages fell, Azerbaijani forces captured or executed them. Fear of a similar fate compelled virtually all ethnic Armenians to attempt to flee to Armenia as soon as the exit route through the Lachin Corridor was opened on September 24, 2023.
Our report concludes that the Azerbaijani government, at the highest levels, has condoned, encouraged, and facilitated the commission of, or directly perpetrated, the most egregious forms of violence against Armenians. Together, these abuses reveal a well-organized, comprehensive campaign to empty Nagorno-Karabakh and parts of Armenia of Armenians. Moreover, the international community, time and time again, declined to take the measures needed to hold Azerbaijan to account and to deter the abuses that ultimately led to the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.
