The Artsakh Human Rights Defender has published the interim report on the atrocities committed by Azerbaijan against the people of Artsakh.

Defender Artak Beglaryan has already presented the main content of the report at a press conference on the evening of 1October.

This report is an urgent alarm to the international community and especially international human rights organizations on ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Republic of Artsakh made by the Azerbaijani armed forces. Given the extensive, severe, systematic and indiscriminate cases of human rights violations among civilian population, the report aims at professionally presenting the situation and calling upon the international human rights community to observe it and react properly within its important and ignored responsibilities.

On September 27, 2020, at about 7:10 AM, the armed forces of the Republic of Azerbaijan making full use of air force, missiles, artillery and striking UAVs, launched an attack along the entire state border between Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and Azerbaijan targeting deep-seated civilian settlements including the capital Stepanakert.

The air and artillery strikes of the armed forces of Azerbaijan have intentionally and indiscriminately targeted the civilian population of the Republic of Artsakh, civilian objects which resulted in loss of life and wounded among civilians as well as large-scale damage to public and private property. As of the time of publication of the report, 11 deaths and more than 60 wounded have been recorded among civilians.

To find out the consequences of the wide scale attack of Azerbaijani armed forces launched on September 27, 2020, the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Republic of Artsakh Artak Beglaryan initiated a fact-finding mission, the preliminary results of which (September 27-30) are presented in this interim report. On October 1, directly before the publication of the report, the Human Rights Ombudsman was informed that the Azerbaijani artillery once again intentionally targeted civilian objects in downtown Martuni, as a result of which 4 civilians were killed and 11 wounded. Among the wounded ones, there are several journalists, including 2 reporters from “Le Monde”, France. The consequences of the above-mentioned shelling are not included in the statistics presented in the first section of the report because of the lack of data and time.

The following served as basis for the data presented:

1. Facts discovered by the staff of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Republic of Artsakh during visits to medical institutions,
2. Information obtained by the staff of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Republic of Artsakh on human and material losses between suffered by the civilian population as a result of shelling,
3. Data registered in trustworthy open sources including media publications