“I have read the Declaration of Independence dozens of times and have come to a terrible conclusion that the content of that Declaration of Independence is that the Republic of Armenia cannot exist,” Pashinian declared at the end of a parliament debate on his government’s draft budget for next year. He did not elaborate.
The declaration refers to a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and the then Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and also calls for international recognition of the 1915 genocide of Armenians “in Ottoman Turkey and Western Armenia.” It is cited in a preamble to the current Armenian constitution adopted in 1995.
Baku says that the reference to the 1989 document constitutes territorial claims to Azerbaijan which regained full control of Karabakh in September 2023. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev regularly states that its scrapping is a necessary condition for the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
The only legal way to do that is to adopt a new constitution. Pashinian announced such plans early this year. He said that Armenia “will never have peace” with Azerbaijan as long as the declaration is mentioned in its constitution. His statement drew strong condemnation from opposition leaders and other critics who accused him of making yet another unilateral concession to Baku.
Pashinian’s latest criticism of the declaration came one day after he rejected the continuing Azerbaijani demands for the change of his country’s constitution. He said on Wednesday that the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace process will be deadlocked unless Baku drops those demands.
In May, the Armenian premier ordered an ad hoc government body to draft the new constitution by the end of 2026. The head of the body said afterwards that it will likely be put on a referendum in 2027.