Following a single session that lasted for just a hew hours, the court on Thursday gave the green light for parliamentary ratification of a recent agreement with Azerbaijan supposedly laying out the principles of delineating the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. The agreement involves “regulations” for joint activities of Armenian and Azerbaijani government commissions dealing with the border delimitation process.
The full text of the court’s decision was publicized at the weekend. The main focus of the 33-page document is not the regulations but the constitution’s preamble that mentions a 1990 declaration of Armenia’s independence.
The declaration in turn cites a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and the then Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. Baku says that this continues a territorial claim to Azerbaijan which regained full control over Karabakh as a result of a September 2023 offensive. Azerbaijani leaders have regularly stated in recent months that Baku will not sign a peace treaty with Yerevan unless this and other, unspecified Armenian legal acts are repealed.
The only legal way to scrap the preamble is to enact a new constitution. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and his political team have indicated that they will try to do that in 2027. They have said at the same time that the preamble has no legal impact on the current Armenian government’s recognition of Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh.
The Constitutional Court effectively echoed those assurances in its ruling that was supposed to focus on the border delimitation regulations’ conformity with the Armenian constitution. It said that the constitutional reference to the 1990 declaration “does not apply to any principle or aim which is not enshrined in the [articles of the] Constitution.”
Armenian opposition figures and legal experts critical of the government condemned this interpretation of the preamble, accusing the court of overstepping its powers. The vast majority of the court’s judges have been installed by Pashinian’s administration.
Artsvik Minasian, a senior parliamentarian from the main opposition Hayastan alliance, said on Tuesday that they committed a crime and will be held accountable after regime change in Armenia. He suggested that Pashinian ordered the unusual ruling in a further bid to convince Baku to drop its precondition.
“The Constitutional Court is trying to satisfy all sides in a way that subordinates the interests of Armenia and the Armenian people to those of others,” Minasian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“The Constitutional Court of a sovereign country has reacted to Azerbaijan’s demands and said that in the Declaration of Independence there are no territorial claims to Azerbaijan,” said Edmon Marukian, a more moderate oppositionist who was until recently allied to Pashinian.
Marukian claimed that the Armenian premier is thus going out of his way to achieve a partial Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal. He predicted that Baku will stick to its precondition despite Pashinian’s appeasement efforts.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has also rejected the very idea of signing such a deal that would leave the remaining disagreements unresolved. Armenian opposition leaders maintain that Aliyev has no intention to make peace with Armenia before clinching more far-reaching concessions from Pashinian.