Conference on preservation of Nagorno-Karabakh cultural and religious heritage to be held in European Parliament

 
A conference on the preservation of Nagorno-Karabakh’s cultural and religious heritage will take place in the European Parliament, Armenpress reports.

It will be held at the initiative of MEP Miriam Lexmann.

Speaking at a press conference ahead of the event, Lexmann noted that the Armenian heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh is being destroyed and Azerbaijan’s actions are left unpunished.

“Yes, today the EU needs gas, for which it signed an agreement with Azerbaijan, but we don’t have the right to question or ignore the EU value system,” she said.

Pierre d’Argent, professor at the University of Louvain and a guest professor at the University of Leiden, Counsel for Armenia before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), stressed that the Azerbaijani government is distorting reality by denying the existence of the Armenian cultural heritage.

Armenia’s Ambassador to Belgium and Permanent Representative to the EU, Tigran Balayan, said that the Azerbaijani authorities began the campaign of destroying Armenian cultural heritage back in 2005, when thousands of khachkars were destroyed in Nakhijevan. 

“We have reached this point because nothing was done to prevent it,” he said.