Luis Moreno Ocampo: The USA, Israel and the EU are guilty of everything that happened in Artsakh

Before doing anything, Aliyev is testing the waters, the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, said in an interview with Alpha News.

“First, Aliyev is testing the waters. Look what happened in the Lachin corridor. First, he sends so-called environmental activists who are not members of the Azerbaijani government. He then deploys security forces there, partially blocking the Lachin corridor, and then escalates the blockade. He saw that nothing had happened. Yes, the leaders of some countries called on him to stop, but nothing happened. He is not a fool, he tests their reaction,” Ocampo said.

According to him, the USA, Israel, and the EU are to blame for everything that happened in Artsakh, since they allowed Azerbaijan to do it.

“The mistake was made by other countries, including the USA, Israel, the EU, which allowed him to do this. Therefore, it is important for me to understand what happened there when we call ethnic cleansing genocide. It is not as big as the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide, but it is still genocide, just like the Hamas attack on Israel. It is smaller, but it is still genocide.

In legal terms, this is genocide, and the state has a legal obligation to prevent genocide. That is why it is very important that Israel stop supplying weapons to Azerbaijan and that the United States stop providing financial aid to Azerbaijan. These will be the signals that Aliyev will understand. Of course, in the end, people decide for themselves what to do, but we must do a better job and inform them better,” Ocampo noted.

According to the former prosecutor, everything must now be done to ensure that Azerbaijan releases all the hostages in Baku.

“Now the priority should not be to force Aliyev to stop and attack, but to return Karabakh to these people and release all those held hostage in Baku. Aliyev has 55 people in prison, 16 of whom were captured after the September attack. Some of them are politicians, some are ordinary people, some are military men.

But none of them will be released without strong pressure from international structures and other countries, since Azerbaijan does not have an independent judicial system. Not a single judge in Azerbaijan will go against Aliyev. The State Department’s 2022 report notes that Azerbaijan does not have independent judges.

Therefore, these people who are in prisons in Azerbaijan today are victims of the genocide. They are in prisons for no reason; they are in Azerbaijani prisons to send a message to the Armenians that if you return to Nagorno-Karabakh, you will be tortured, arrested or killed. That is why these 55 hostages are being held in Baku prisons,” Ocampo concluded.