Armenia files ICJ case under ICERD §

Filing

On 16 September 2021 Armenia instituted proceedings against Azerbaijan before the International Court of Justice under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Azerbaijan filed a parallel case against Armenia days later. The cases did not litigate genocide as such; their jurisdictional base was ICERD, which focuses on racial discrimination.

Armenia's application alleged a long pattern of anti-Armenian hatred, mistreatment of prisoners of war and civilian detainees, failure to investigate abuses, destruction or alteration of Armenian cultural heritage, and discriminatory state rhetoric. It placed post-2020 events within a historical chain reaching back to Sumgait, Baku and the Safarov case.

Provisional measures

The case produced the December 2021 provisional-measures order, in which the Court required both states to prevent incitement and preserve rights under ICERD. It later became the procedural foundation for Armenia's requests during the Lachin blockade, including the February 2023, July 2023 and November 2023 orders.

The Court's role was important but limited. It could identify plausible rights and order interim protection; it could not police the Lachin road, return prisoners, or compel Azerbaijan's domestic media environment to change overnight. The difference between legal clarity and enforcement capacity is one of the central patterns of the post-2020 period editorial.

Analytical significance

The ICJ application translated Armenian security claims into the language of discrimination rather than territorial self-determination. That shift matters. After the 2020 war, the old Minsk Group vocabulary of status, interim arrangements and referendum receded. The legal vocabulary became prisoner treatment, cultural rights, humanitarian access, safe return and non-discrimination under Azerbaijani sovereignty.

In that sense, the application marks a change in what could still be argued internationally. Armenia could no longer rely on control of territory; it tried instead to build a record that Azerbaijani control itself carried discriminatory risk for Armenians. Whether that record can produce remedies after the disappearance of the Karabakh Armenian population remains uncertain.