OSCE Madrid Basic Principles for the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict §

What the document says

The "Madrid Basic Principles" were never released as a single signed text. They were tabled by the United States, Russian and French co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group to the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan at the OSCE Ministerial Council in Madrid on 29 November 2007 and refined in updated form in late 2009 and 2010. The most authoritative public articulation is the joint statement issued at the G8 L'Aquila summit on 10 July 2009 by Presidents Medvedev (Russia), Sarkozy (France) and Obama (United States), which set out the six principles in the order in which the co-chair countries chose to present them.

The six principles

1. Return of the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani control.
2. An interim status for Nagorno-Karabakh providing guarantees for security and self-governance.
3. A corridor linking Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh.
4. Future determination of the final legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh through a legally binding expression of will.
5. The right of return for all internally displaced persons and refugees to their former places of residence.
6. International security guarantees, including a peacekeeping operation.

How each side read it

The Armenian government accepted the principles in 2009 as the basis for negotiation but read them as a package: the Armenian withdrawal in clauses 1, 3 and 6 was conditional on the prior achievement of clauses 2 and 4, an interim status with security guarantees and a binding referendum. The Azerbaijani government read the same package as a sequenced settlement: clauses 1, 5 and 6 first (territorial return, refugee return, security), with the final-status clause 4 deferred indefinitely. Larrabee and Wilson (2010) treat this asymmetry, acceptance of the same text with opposite sequencing demands, as the structural reason the framework never produced an agreement.

Why principle 5 matters now

The right of return for all internally displaced persons and refugees, principle 5, is the same legal-political principle invoked by both sides at different points: by Azerbaijan to demand the return of the 700,000–800,000 Azerbaijanis displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts during the 1992–94 war (acknowledged in UNSC 822 and successive resolutions); and by Armenia to demand the return of the approximately 100,000 ethnic Armenians displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023 (acknowledged in the UNHCR Karabakh displacement record and the ICJ provisional-measures order of 17 November 2023). Symmetric in form; symmetric in legal authority; differently honoured in practice. sourced opinion

Status after 2020

The September–November 2020 war and the 9 November 2020 ceasefire statement settled clauses 1 and 3 by force in the Azerbaijani favour and made clauses 2 and 4 effectively moot. The Minsk Group format remained nominally in place until the parties jointly requested its dissolution at the OSCE Ministerial Council in 2025. The Madrid principles remain in the documentary record as the most considered international articulation of what a negotiated settlement might have looked like, and the principles 4 and 5 remain the legal vocabulary in which displaced-persons claims continue to be argued before the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.