Menu
Latest
Menu
Latest
Ilham Aliev chairs UN Security Council Meeting. The Azerbaijani President referred to the Karabakh conflict and accused Armenia of ethnic cleansing.

Ilham Aliev chairs UN Security Council Meeting. The Azerbaijani President referred to the Karabakh conflict and accused Armenia of ethnic cleansing.

5 May 2012

The President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliev yesterday opened the 6765th session of the United Nations Security Council in New York and chaired the first meeting. Azerbaijan has the Chairmanship of the Council for the month of May under the system of rotating chairmanship between the fifteeen members of the Council which include the five permanent members (Britain, China, France, Russia and the US) and ten members elected for two years by the General Assembly.

The focus of the current session is the anti terrorist struggle. President Aliev said that  “Azerbaijan strongly condemns all the forms of terrorism. We consider all terror acts as a crime and they should be condemned and punished. Terrorists should not be given pretext for their acts. Terror acts can not be justified regardless of their motivation."

The meeting of the Security Council comes ahead of next month’s review by the General Assembly of the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy.

In his speech the Azerbaijani leader also referred to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and linked terrorism with "agressive separatism, extremism and organised crime". Aliev also accused Armenia of ethnic cleansing during the Karabakh conflict.

Commonspace.eu political editor said that Aliev's speech "indicates that Azerbaijan will try to use the platform of the Security Council to bring the Karabakh conflict to the attention of the international community. It will however not be possible to push the Council to adopt any meaningful resolution on Karabakh since the Permanent members are still committed to the Minsk Process as the mechanism to deal with the efforts to resolve it, and a role for the UN at this stage is not envisaged. There may however be some humanitarian asspects of the problem that may be taken up by the world body and it is likely that Azerbaijan will have a strategy to push in this direction over the coming months."

source: commonspace.eu

photo: The President of Azerbaijan addressing the opening of the 6765 session of the united Nations Security Council in New York on 4 May 2012 (picture courtesy of the Press Service of the President of Azerbaijan).

Related articles

Editor's choice
News
International Election Observation Mission finds that Armenians were offered a genuine choice against a backdrop of direct foreign pressure and uneven campaign opportunities
Trending

International Election Observation Mission finds that Armenians were offered a genuine choice against a backdrop of direct foreign pressure and uneven campaign opportunities

8 June 2026
Farah Karimi, Special Co-ordinator and leader of the short-term OSCE observer mission, said that: “The concentration of arrests and criminal prosecutions against opposition figures contributed to perceptions of selective justice, while a polarized media landscape, inflammatory rhetoric, misinformation, and persistent foreign pressure and interference challenged Armenia’s democratic resilience and the integrity of public debate. This underscores the importance of continued efforts to strengthen democratic institutions, safeguard fundamental freedoms, and foster public trust in democratic processes. ” Damien Cottier, Head of the delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, argued that “The Armenian elections took place in a particularly tense geopolitical context, with direct foreign interference. In particular, pressure and threats from Russian authorities reached an unprecedented and worrying level.” Janez Lenarčič, head of the election observation mission from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, stated that “Armenia’s voters were given – and took – the opportunity to make a genuine choice in a professionally managed election process and a vibrant and pluralistic, if often highly polarized campaign. “Unfortunately, they had to make that choice against the backdrop of unprecedented foreign interference and pressure, in the form of punitive trade measures and day-by-day threats of further negative consequences contingent on which choice they made”. == click image to read full report

Popular

Editor's choice
Interview
Thursday Interview: Murad Muradov
Trending

Thursday Interview: Murad Muradov

15 January 2026
Today, commonspace.eu starts a new regular weekly series. THURSDAY INTERVIEW, conducted by Lauri Nikulainen, will host  persons who are thinkers, opinion shapers, and implementors in their countries and spheres. We start the series with an interview with Murad Muradov, a leading person in Azerbaijan's think tank community. He is also the first co-chair of the Action Committee for a new Armenian-Azerbaijani Dialogue. Last September he made history by being the first Azerbaijani civil society activist to visit Armenia after the 44 day war, and the start of the peace process. Speaking about this visit Murad Muradov said: "My experience was largely positive. My negative expectations luckily didn’t play out. The discussions were respectful, the panel format bringing together experts from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey was particularly valuable during the NATO Rose-Roth Seminar in Yerevan, and media coverage, while varied in tone, remained largely constructive. Some media outlets though attempted to represent me as more of a government mouthpiece than an independent expert, which was totally misleading.  Overall, I see these initiatives as important steps in rebuilding trust and normalising professional engagement. The fact that soon a larger Azerbaijani civil society visits to Armenia followed, reinforces the sense that this process is moving in the right direction." (click the image to read the interview in full)
Murad Muradov
Lauri Nikulainen interviews Murad Muradov