Ruben Vardanyan's message reveals, as an additional source, the flagrant violations that have occurred and are occurring in Azerbaijan.of Euromedia24Siranush Sahakyan, the representative of prisoners of war at the European Court of Human Rights, President of the Center for International and Comparative Law, expressed a similar point of view in a conversation with the former Minister of State of Artsakh, Ruben Vardanyan, from the Azerbaijani prison.
"It is evidence that the persons were under coercion, threats to their lives, torture and other ill-treatment and forced to sign. Moreover, coercion was applied not only to Armenian hostages, but also to persons carrying out professional activities in relation to them, such as are lawyers and translators. There is a general practice that Azerbaijani lawyers refuse to take over the defense of Armenians due to reasons of their own security. There are already recorded cases when the commissioned lawyer stops his activity. This is also evidence that they were deprived of the opportunity to organize a defense and this statement is consistent with the testimony of the repatriated prisoners, when they were forced to sign papers, the contents of which were drawn up at a later stage and the contents of which were not known to the prisoners., said the human rights defender.
As for the speculations that the message may be fake, Sahakyan expressed a different opinion. "We have no problem questioning the information. First of all, the source is the family, and the family received this information during the telephone conversation. I think the Red Cross has also reaffirmed that during the previous weeks, it provided phone calls between the Armenian hostages and their families. Of course, it is clear that the content of the message is not desirable for Azerbaijan, and in this regard there are also risks of punitive or other actions, which all Armenians are under, regardless of the words said or not said.Siranush Sahakyan mentioned.
It should be noted that today at 15:00 the trial in the case of the former officials of Artsakh started in Baku.
Sona Harutyunyan
