Blockade of the Lachin Corridor §

Origin

The Lachin Corridor is the single road connecting the Armenian-populated parts of Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia proper. Its security regime was established by paragraph 6 of the trilateral statement of 9 November 2020 that ended the Second Karabakh War:

"The Lachin Corridor (5 km wide), which will provide a connection between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia while not passing through the city of Shusha, shall remain under the control of the peacekeeping contingent of the Russian Federation."

On 12 December 2022, a group of Azerbaijani citizens, described by the Azerbaijani government as "eco-activists" protesting illegal mining, blocked the corridor at Shusha. They were transported to the protest site by Azerbaijani-state vehicles and equipped with food, water and tents on a continuous rotation; the protest persisted, in the same place, with the same equipment, for nine months (ICRC).

The blockade evolved over its duration:

• 12 December 2022 onward: corridor closed to private and humanitarian Armenian traffic; only International Committee of the Red Cross convoys and Russian peacekeepers passed.
• 9 January 2023: gas supply from Armenia cut for the first time.
• 23 April 2023: Azerbaijan installed a checkpoint at the Hakari Bridge on the corridor, formalising the blockade as a state border-control operation.
• June 2023: ICRC convoys also halted.
• 19–20 September 2023: 24-hour Azerbaijani military operation; surrender of Nagorno-Karabakh forces.
• 24 September – 4 October 2023: exodus of >100,000 ethnic Armenians through the same corridor that had been blocked, running in the opposite direction, this time outward.

Mechanism

The blockade combined four state instruments:

1. Civil-society cover ("eco-activist" framing).
2. Physical roadblock with state-supplied logistics.
3. Cessation of utilities (gas, electricity, internet).
4. State border-control operation following the 23 April checkpoint.

The legal framing offered by Azerbaijan was that the road was being used for illegal mining and military supply; this was not accepted by the ICJ in its provisional-measures orders (see below).

Effects

The 270,000 monthly tonnes of cargo that had passed the corridor before December 2022 fell to near-zero. By August 2023 ICRC (which until early 2023 had operated convoys of medical, food and family-reunion movements) reported that fresh-food shortages had become severe; a baby in Stepanakert was reported on 16 August 2023 as the first confirmed starvation death of the blockade. UN OCHA estimated that the population of Nagorno-Karabakh (~120,000) was experiencing a humanitarian emergency.

Luis Moreno Ocampo, former first Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, published an independent legal opinion on 7 August 2023 arguing that the blockade satisfied the actus reus of genocide under Article II(c) of the 1948 Convention, "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" (Ocampo 2023).

The ICJ issued binding provisional-measures orders:

• 22 February 2023, Order (13 votes to 2): "Azerbaijan shall, pending the final decision in the case and in accordance with its obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, take all measures at its disposal to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions."
• 6 July 2023, Modification: rejected Azerbaijan's request to vary the order.
• 17 November 2023, post-exodus order confirming earlier obligations and adding requirements on protection of remaining Armenians and cultural heritage.

Azerbaijan did not comply with any of these orders. There was no enforcement.

Reception and politics

The European Parliament's resolution of 5 October 2023 (491 in favour, 9 against, 33 abstentions) referred to the events as ethnic cleansing. The U.S. State Department on 12 September 2023 referred to the situation as a "humanitarian crisis" but stopped short of "ethnic cleansing"; President Biden and Secretary Blinken used the same language. Russian peacekeepers, present under paragraph 6 of the trilateral statement, did not enforce free passage; the Russian government's effective abandonment of Karabakh's Armenians is one of the most striking foreign-policy reversals of the post-Soviet era (sourced opinion: de Waal, 2023 edition).

The defensible characterisation is that the Lachin blockade was a state-organised siege that combined plausibly-deniable civic cover with hard infrastructure; that it directly produced the conditions for the September 2023 surrender; and that the failure of Russian peacekeepers, OSCE Minsk Group and UN Security Council to enforce free passage on a defined humanitarian corridor under a binding ICJ order constitutes one of the most striking failures of the international order in the 2020s editorial. The blockade is the single most legally-documented Azerbaijani action of the entire conflict (sourced opinion: Ocampo; ICJ February 2023 Order).