This week Azerbaijan marks the sixth anniversary of its victory in the Second Karabakh War. The 44-day war, which ended with the trilateral statement of 10 November 2020, restored Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over territories that had been under occupation for nearly three decades and fundamentally reshaped the regional order in the South Caucasus. Six years on, the question is no longer whether the conflict can be reignited. It is whether Baku and Yerevan can transform the de facto peace that now exists between them into a durable, legally binding settlement.
There are good reasons for cautious optimism. In August 2025, President Aliyev and Prime Minister Pashinyan initialed the text of the Agreement on Peace and the Establishment of Interstate Relations at the White House, in the presence of US President Donald Trump. In the very first articles of that agreement, the two sides confirm that they have no territorial claims against each other and will raise none in the future. Since then, the border has remained calm, trade links have begun to be restored, and Azerbaijani officials have publicly described the current state of relations as “real peace”. The Armenian government, for its part, has repeatedly called the signing of the treaty one of its highest priorities.
Yet more than a year later, the treaty remains unsigned. The main reason is well known: the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia.
The constitutional obstacle
The preamble of Armenia’s Constitution refers to the Declaration of Independence of 23 August 1990. The Declaration, in turn, is explicitly based on the joint decision of 1 December 1989 of the Supreme Soviet of the Armenian SSR and the so-called National Council of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) “on the reunification” of the two. Through this chain of references, the founding legal document of the Armenian state remains anchored in a claim to territory that is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan.
Yerevan argues that this reference carries no legal force and points to a 2024 ruling of its Constitutional Court. But a court’s interpretation can be revisited by a later court, and a government’s political assurances can be reversed by its successor. A peace treaty that is meant to last for generations must rest on text, not on interpretation. As long as the preamble remains unchanged, any future government in Yerevan could invoke it to question the treaty’s validity, and the Constitutional Court, which must review the agreement before ratification, could find it incompatible with the country’s Basic Law. Baku has also made clear that it does not prescribe the form of the change. Whether Armenia adopts a new constitution or uses another legal mechanism is its own decision. What matters is the result: the formal removal of provisions that amount to territorial claims against Azerbaijan.
Notably, the Armenian leadership itself has arrived at similar conclusions. Prime Minister Pashinyan has described the Declaration of Independence as a document built on the logic of conflict, and the ruling party has confirmed that the new draft constitution will contain no reference to it. The difficulty lies in the political process. Putting a new constitution to a referendum requires 70 votes in the 105-seat National Assembly, while the ruling Civil Contract party holds 64, and the main opposition factions have so far refused to support it. The referendum is currently expected in 2027.
Not an Azerbaijani invention
Critics in Armenia and in some Western capitals portray Baku’s position as an excessive precondition, or even as a pretext for delaying peace. History suggests otherwise. Removing territorial claims from constitutional texts has been a standard component of durable peace settlements, including in Europe itself.
The clearest precedent is Germany. Until 1990, the preamble of the West German Basic Law called on the German people to achieve the unity of Germany, while Article 23 allowed “other parts of Germany” to accede to the Federal Republic. For Poland, whose western border along the Oder-Neisse line had been drawn after the Second World War on formerly German lands, these provisions were anything but abstract. The Two Plus Four Treaty of September 1990 therefore obliged the united Germany to ensure that its constitution contained no provision incompatible with the finality of its borders, explicitly naming the preamble and Article 23. Germany amended the preamble and repealed Article 23 with unification on 3 October 1990. Only then, on 14 November 1990, did Germany and Poland sign the treaty confirming their common border. Nobody today regards this as a humiliation imposed on Germany. It was the price of credibility, and it laid the foundation for one of the most successful reconciliations in modern European history.
The Irish case points in the same direction. For six decades, Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution asserted that the national territory consisted of the whole island of Ireland. As part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Dublin committed to changing them, and in May 1998 Irish voters approved the Nineteenth Amendment by an overwhelming majority, replacing the territorial claim with an aspiration to unity achieved only by consent. The amendment entered into force in December 1999, together with the British-Irish Agreement. In Ireland, too, a constitutional referendum was understood not as a surrender of national sovereignty but as an exercise of it in the service of peace.
These precedents show that Azerbaijan is not asking Armenia to do anything that established European democracies have not done themselves. Baku is not waiting for a symbolic gesture. It is waiting for the legal foundation without which the peace treaty would remain hostage to the shifting tides of domestic politics in Armenia. President Aliyev’s foreign policy adviser, Hikmet Hajiyev, has described the constitutional change as just one final step. It is precisely this step that would make the peace irreversible.
The geopolitical test
The constitutional question is not the only challenge. The peace process is also exposed to geopolitical headwinds, the most visible of which now surround the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). Agreed in Washington in August 2025, the route through Armenia’s Syunik province will connect mainland Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan exclave and, more broadly, strengthen the Middle Corridor linking Central Asia with Europe. On 2 November, Prime Minister Pashinyan told the Armenian parliament that his government would soon begin commissioning designs for the route’s railway, highway and power lines, a sign that the project is moving from political declarations to implementation.
Iran’s reaction has been a reminder of how fragile the regional environment remains. Tehran’s ambassador in Yerevan has signalled that Iran would not tolerate any foreign security presence associated with the route. This week, Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran’s former foreign minister and long-time senior adviser to the Supreme Leader, went further. In an open letter addressed to Pashinyan and published in the Iranian daily Ettelaat, he warned that Iran would resist any attempt to cross its “red lines” in the South Caucasus. Russia, which also views the route with suspicion, has encouraged anti-TRIPP sentiment in Armenian public discourse.
These concerns rest on a misreading of the project. TRIPP operates under Armenia’s sovereignty and jurisdiction, involves no change of borders, and is a commercial infrastructure project, not a military one. Reopened communications would benefit every country in the region, including Iran, which has itself long served as a transit route between mainland Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan. Threatening rhetoric only emboldens those who prefer a South Caucasus divided by closed borders and dependent on external patrons.
A window that should not be wasted
The two challenges are connected. The longer the treaty remains unsigned, the more room external actors have to exploit uncertainty, and the more vulnerable connectivity projects such as TRIPP become. Conversely, a constitutional change in Armenia, followed by the signing and ratification of the peace agreement, would lock in the gains of the past six years and leave far less space for spoilers, whether in Tehran, Moscow or elsewhere.
Armenia’s international partners, in the United States and in Europe, can help by making clear to the Armenian public that removing territorial claims from a constitution is an accepted European practice rather than an imposition from Baku. The German and Irish experiences are the strongest arguments available for that case.
Six years after the war, the battlefield phase of this conflict is over. What remains is legal and political work. As the European precedents show, borders become permanent not when the guns fall silent, but when constitutions stop contesting them.
source:Dr. Vasif Huseynov is Head of the Western Studies Department at the Center for Analysis of International Relations and Multiculturalism (AIR Center) in Baku and Adjunct Professor at Khazar University.
photo: TRIPP proposed route
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