IAS Missle Karabakh

New article argues that Azerbaijan’s war in Nagorno-Karabakh was illegal

ByArtyom Tonoyan

When Azerbaijan with the help of Turkey launched the war to retake Nagorno-Karabakh in late September 2020, it sought to portray its adventure as defensive in nature, reacting to events rather than dictating them. Ilham Aliyev attempted to give what was clearly a war of aggression some semblance of legal grounding and therefore legal justification. Furthermore, as the Azerbaijani president likes to say repeatedly, Azerbaijan took it upon itself to enforce the 1993 UN Security Council resolutions calling on Armenian armed forces to retreat from “occupied areas of Azerbaijan.” Now a pair of European legal scholars with training in international law and the laws of war have authored an article that appeared in the European Journal of International Law undermining and all but nullifying the Aliyev regime’s legal pretensions.

The authors of the article are Tom Ruys and Felipe Rodríguez Silvestre, professor of international law and a doctoral researcher respectively, affiliated with Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI), at Ghent University in Belgium. Broadly speaking, their purpose is to investigate how the important (if often overlooked) international legal principle known as jus ad bellum applies, (or does not), to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Since the war was waged on Azerbaijan’s initiative, despite that country’s insistence on the contrary, it is Azerbaijan’s actions that most interest the authors and whether the justifications put forth by Azerbaijan hold any legal merit.

Feb. 11, 2022

Thus the crucial question to which the authors seek an answer is the following: “When part of one state’s territory is occupied by another state for a prolonged duration, can the former state have lawful recourse to military force to recover its land?”. As Ruys and Rodríguez Silvestre will then demonstrate, though the issue is complicated and Azerbaijan’s grievances are real, and perhaps even compelling, the answer is far from obvious. Moreover, as they put it “Upon weighing the arguments, we believe a negative answer is in order.”

Now to the arguments.

According to the authors, there are several reasons why Azerbaijan’s arguments lack merit. First they argue that Azerbaijan’s invocation of the right to self-defense is irreconcilable with an important component of the jus ad bellum, the “immediacy requirement,” which posits that in order for a conflict to have a legitimate footing there needs to be an immediate threat of danger to the side initiating conflict, notwithstanding the fact of a prolonged occupation of parts of its territories. As they put it “the lapse of time between the initial attack and the invocation of self-defence cannot be extended indefinitely.” Furthermore,

“the state whose territory is invaded in breach of the prohibition on the use of force will lose the ability to invoke the right of self-defence if it either (i) refrains from responding with counter-force for a prolonged period of time (taking into account the need for negotiation, military preparation, efforts to seek third-state support, etc.), or (ii) responds with counter-force, but ultimately fails to repel the invading forces from its territory before a prolonged cessation of active hostilities occurs.”