The government had reluctantly allowed them to read a copy of the document, marked “top secret,” in December 2023. Without disclosing its provisions, the deputies representing the main opposition Hayastan alliance said afterwards that it only reinforced their concerns that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian is planning further unilateral concessions to Baku without securing anything in return.
Pashinian responded by saying that they will no longer have access to the draft treaty which he hoped to negotiate before the end of this year. Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan signed a relevant order in March. Mirzoyan’s press office implicitly accused the Armenian opposition of undermining the negotiation process and making “wrong and arbitrary public interpretations of the document.”
The Hayastan lawmakers announced on Monday that they have asked a Yerevan court to overturn that decision. One of them, Artur Khachatrian, dismissed the official justification of the ban as “pathetic.”
“We acted within the law,” Khachatrian told journalists. “Otherwise, I would be facing criminal prosecution at the very least.”
“We made a political assessment that the piece of paper circulated between the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministries is a capitulation agreement … posing a threat to Armenia’s territorial integrity,” he said.
Baku and Yerevan have said in recent months they now disagree on only a couple of provisions of the draft treaty. Pashinian proposed in late August that they sign an interim accord that would leave out those unpublicized sticking points. The Azerbaijani side rejected the proposal.
It appears to have also ignored Pashinian’s subsequent offer to hold “intensive” talks and bridge the remaining differences ahead of the COP29 climate summit held in Baku last month. Mirzoyan and other Armenian officials have claimed that Azerbaijan may invade Armenia after the summit.
Pashinian’s domestic critics say he is desperate to secure an incomplete peace deal in hopes of misleading Armenians and increasing his chances of holding on to power. They also maintain that Azerbaijan has no intention to make peace with Armenia before clinching more far-reaching concessions from Pashinian.