Chief of the Staff of the Ombudsman Office participated in OIC Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission Discussions of the Report on Azerbaijan in Jeddah

Chief of the Staff of the Ombudsman Office and member of the OIC Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission Mr. Aydin Safikhanli participated in the 18^th Meeting of the Commission held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Sessions addressed the issues-based agenda, which covered topics on the current situation of the implementation of UN SDGs within the OIC Member States, good experiences of human rights protection, and Mission Reports of the Commission.

As reported, on 22-26 September 2021, at the invitation of Commissioner for Human Rights (Ombudsman) Ms. Sabina Aliyeva, the Delegation headed by the Chairman of the Commission visited Azerbaijan in a view to conducting a fact-finding mission to investigate the violations committed in the liberated areas and conflict-affected areas, located far from the combat zone, where civilians and civilian objects were targeted by the missiles. As a result of the findings of this fact-finding visit, a Report was developed.

The abovementioned Report was a point of the discussions held in the 18th Meeting. The Commission in its Report assessed war crimes committed in the liberated territories and conflict-affected areas of Azerbaijan, severe violations of human rights and freedoms, destructing, plundering, and desecrating national and cultural, historical, architectural, and religious monuments, including mosques have been assessed as breaches of international humanitarian law.  

At the end of the Report, the Commission recommended the UN, OSCE, and other regional organizations to create international human rights monitoring center in order to investigate the violations of human rights committed by Armenia’s military and political leadership, to search for people missing during the First Karabakh War within the mandate of the ICRC, to provide psychological assistance to their families, to create multiply coordination mechanisms, as well as OIC, World Bank and Islamic Development Bank to allocate financial resources to the repatriation of Azerbaijani IDPs to their homelands.  

The Commission unanimously adopted the Report and decided to include the discussion of the Report in the agenda of the Meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of OIC to be held in March 2022.