“Until a peace treaty is signed and Armenia completely renounces all territorial claims against Azerbaijan, which are still present in its constitution, and demonstrates sincerity in its behavior towards normalizing relations with Azerbaijan, the risk of a new military confrontation will always persist,” he told an international forum in Baku.
Aliyev has repeatedly made the signing of the treaty conditional on a change of the current Armenian constitution. He has specifically demanded the removal of a reference to Armenia’s 1990 declaration of independence contained in the constitution’s preamble. The declaration in turn cites a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenian leaders maintain that the reference does not amount to territorial claims to Azerbaijan. They have also argued that the draft Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty commits the two states to recognizing each other’s territorial integrity and stipulates that they cannot refer to their domestic legislation to justify their possible failure to implement it.
While rejecting Aliyev’s precondition in public, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has pledged to try to enact a new constitution through a referendum. But this is unlikely to happen before June 2026. Yerevan already made a number of concessions last month to remove the remaining disagreements on the text of the draft treaty.
Pashinian’s domestic political opponents say that Baku will not sign the deal before clinching further Armenian concessions not only on the constitution but also other key issues such as a land corridor to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave. Aliyev renewed in January this year his threats to open such a corridor by force.
Azerbaijan began accusing Armenia of violating the ceasefire regime along the border between the two countries on a daily basis just a few days after the two sides finalized the peace treaty a month ago. Armenian opposition figures and pundits have suggested that the accusations denied by Yerevan are aimed at preparing the ground for a military attack on Armenia or forcing Pashinian to make the concessions.
Residents of two Armenian border villages have reported nightly cross-border gunfire from Azerbaijani army positions for over two weeks. According to them, Azerbaijani troops mainly fire into the air.