The agreement signed on August 30 involves “regulations” for joint activities of Armenian and Azerbaijani government commissions dealing with the delimitation process. It does not specify which maps or other legal documents will be used for that purpose.
The regulations say that the process will be based, unless agreed otherwise, on the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration in which newly independent ex-Soviet republics recognized each other’s Soviet-era borders. Earlier this month, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry downplayed the legal significance of that declaration, saying that it “has nothing to do with the question of where the borders of CIS member states lie and which territories belong to which country.”
The Armenian parliament controlled by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s party ratified the regulations on Wednesday amid strong opposition criticism. Opposition lawmakers pointed to the lack of specifics in them, saying that it could only help Azerbaijan clinch more territorial concessions from Armenia and hold on to Armenian border areas seized in the early 1990s as well as in 2022-2021.
President Vahagn Khachaturian signed the ratification bill into law late on Thursday. The office of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced on Friday that he too has formally approved the border deal.
The announcement came the day after Aliyev and Pashinian met on the sidelines of a BRICS summit held in the Russian city of Kazan. The official readouts of the talks said they discussed ongoing efforts to negotiate an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty as well as delimit the border.
The Kazan talks were attended by deputy prime ministers of the two nations who signed the August 30 deal more than four months after Pashinian controversially agreed to cede four disputed border areas to Azerbaijan. The unilateral land transfer sparked massive anti-government demonstrations in Yerevan in May and June. Pashinian claimed in March that Azerbaijan will attack Armenia unless it regains control of those areas.