European Court to consider destroyed Armenian khachkars in Nakhichevan

The European Court for Human Rights has accepted to consideration the claim against Azerbaijan demanding to find the state guilty of destroying Armenian khachkars in Staraya Dzhuga (Nakhichevan). The claim against the government of Azerbaijan was filed by the organization named "The Board West-Armenian Armenians".

According to Samvel Karapetyan, coordinator of the Yerevan-based office of the "Organization for Studying Armenian Architecture", a mass destruction of Armenian khachkars (stone crosses) was registered in 1998 in the Armenian cemetery in Staraya Dzhuga. Many khachkars were buried under earth, the remaining were destroyed and thrown into the Araks River.

Many times the visits of various monitoring groups who wanted to see the status of Armenian khachkars in the Armenian cemetery in Staraya Dzhuga were disrupted. Thus, the visit of the PACE delegation planned for October 8-12 last year was postponed; the reason was in Baku's precondition that the PACE delegation, which planned to go also to Nagorno-Karabakh, where some monitoring had also been planned, should have arrived there only through the territory of Azerbaijan.

According to the Institute of Ethnography and Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences, over 3500 khachkars were ruined in Nakhichevan.