National Assembly Chairman Alen Simonyan stated at the sitting of the Parliament on 22 October that the former authorities recognised Artsakh as part of Azerbaijan on the basis of the Law on Administrative-Territorial Division adopted in 2010. The assertion made by Alen Simonian constitutes a misrepresentation of facts, as, under international law, domestic legislation cannot delineate or alter international boundaries. The demarcation of state borders is established through international treaties and diplomatic agreements and cannot be subject to unilateral interpretation based solely on national law.
Thus, responding to a question from ARF MP Gegham Manukyan of the ‘Armenia’ faction, Simonyan said: ‘When you discussed and adopted the law on “territorial division”, you and your party (i.e. the ARF) mentioned that it was Azerbaijan, so what did you do?
Artsvik Minasyan, another ARF MP belonging to the same faction, retorted to Simonyan. In response, the Speaker of the National Assembly accused Minasyan of lying and said that ARF MPs had previously voted in favour of the law, ‘in which Azerbaijan is written on the other side of the border’.
External boundaries are not determined by internal laws. The manipulation of Pashinyan
The Fact Investigation Platform repeatedly referred to this claim by Simonian and Civic Contract party officials, showing that it was false and did not correspond to reality. The Prime Minister was the first to circulate this false claim.
Discussions on the law ‘On the administrative division of the territory’ began after the 44-day war of 2020, in December, when Nikol Pashinyan, Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, presented extracts from the law describing certain sections of the national border of the Republic of Armenia, in order to justify the transfer of certain Armenian residential areas and roads to Azerbaijani control.
In the first post published on Facebook, Pashinyan mentioned the borders of the villages of Shurnukh and Vorotan in the Syunik region, and later, in another post, he described the borders of the village of Sotk in the Gegharkunik Region.
The Prime Minister made the same statement on public television: “I referred to what was adopted in 2010 in the law “On the administrative division of the territory of the Republic of Armenia”, where the village of Vorotan, in the Syunik Region, borders Azerbaijan.A precise description is given in 2010. If they meant that the territory of Azerbaijan existed on the territory of the Republic of Armenia, then how do they say that the representatives of Azerbaijan entered the territory of the Republic of Armenia, i.e. that Azerbaijan is on the territory of the Republic of Armenia?”
Subsequently, Pashinyan and other members of the Civic Contract party reiterated this assertion on numerous occasions in the public domain.
External boundaries are not determined by internal law
Fip.am previously spoke to experts on the subject to find out whether it is possible to determine external borders by law. According to cartographer Anshavan Barseghyan, the law ‘of the administrative division of territory’ was drafted on the basis of a secret Soviet map. Barseghyan also noted that on the maps he had seen, for example, the village of Chournoukh was entirely Armenian.
“According to my information, the law of the administrative division of the territory was drafted on the basis of Soviet maps, i.e. according to the height, the hill, the location and the way in which the border is crossed, but the law defines the borders of the communities, this law does not define the state of the border,“ says Barseghyan.
Levon Gevorgyan, a member of the Professional Commission for Constitutional Reform, also stated that the law ‘of the administrative division of the territory’ concerns the internal divisions of the State, that it settles the problem of local self-government bodies and that it does not clarify borders with other States.
“The decision on the border does not fall within the powers of the National Assembly. Armenia’s border is determined by interstate agreements, and there is a clear procedure for this. International agreements that determine the border are decisions of a political nature, and naturally they should also be submitted to the Constitutional Court and go through other stages,“ said Gevorgyan in an interview with fip.am.
Gevorgyan noted that the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan had never been specified by an international agreement, nor by the results of the work of an inter-state commission, nor at the level of an international inter-state dispute by a court judge.
Furthermore, if we consider that it is possible to determine an inter-state border by the law of territorial division, Nagorno-Karabakh has never had a common border with the Republic of Armenia, and the fact that the regions adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh belong to Azerbaijan, the Armenian authorities, at least with international partners, have publicly stated that they do not dispute them and that they have negotiated their return to Azerbaijan.
Alain Simonyan is once again making a false statement, noting that the Republic of Armenia recognised Artsakh as part of Azerbaijan in 2010 with the law ‘on the administrative division of the territory’.
Main source: 168.am