Protest held outside UN office in Yerevan

Members of the Together (Miasin) socio-political movement on Tuesday held a protest outside the United Nations office in Yerevan, accusing UN agencies of bias and Azerbaijani influence. The demonstrators handed a petition addressed to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, calling for the withdrawal of a recent UN working group opinion on Armenian businessman and philanthropist Ruben Vardanyan unlawfully held in Azerbaijan.

Its member Zhasmina Ghevondyan recalled that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) concluded on February 17 that Vardanyan’s detention by Azerbaijan was not arbitrary and that his trial in Baku was lawful. “It later emerged that the head of the working group has ties to Azerbaijani companies,” she said, citing an expert opinion by former ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. Ocampo found that the group’s current chair, Ganna Yudkivska, is a partner at Equity Law Firm, which represents Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR in Ukraine. “It turns out there are Azerbaijani agents within UN institutions,” Ghevondyan claimed.

Reading from the group’s petition, academic and commentator Narine Dilbaryan said the WGAD opinion itself was “arbitrary” and “unlawful”. The movement demands that the UN declare the opinion invalid and form a new group. The petition warns that failure to do so would allow Baku to “purchase” similar conclusions in the future to justify its actions against Armenian prisoners.

Dilbaryan criticized the Armenian government for remaining silent on the issue, saying that the Foreign Ministry, the Human Rights Defender’s Office and the Justice Ministry should have responded to the UN decision. “The people held in Baku’s prisons are Armenian citizens. The state must protect their rights, yet the authorities remain silent,” she said.

At the end of the protest, Aram Sargsyan, co-founder of the Together movement and leader of the Democratic Party of Armenia, handed the petition to a UN security officer, who promised it would be delivered to the addressee.