Yerevan /Mediamax/. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said today that “the concept with which the Nagorno Karabakh issue was pursued during the years of independence should be fundamentally addressed.”

“We have two stages: before the Madrid Principles and after them. Before the Madrid Principles, the position of the Armenian side was that Nagorno-Karabakh has never been part of independent Azerbaijan, and in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it exercised its right to self-determination, which, by the way, is recorded in the Alma Ata Declaration.

In the period of transition of power in 2007, when Serzh Sargsyan was the prime minister and Robert Kocharian was the president, the Madrid Principles emerged, which focused on the principles of territorial integrity and self-determination. It was recorded that the status of Nagorno-Karabakh should be clarified by some mechanism, and the mechanism for clarifying that status should be agreed upon with Azerbaijan as well. A serious conceptual change has taken place here,” Nikol Pashinyan said in the National Assembly.

“Self-determination means being somewhere and moving to another place by exercising the right to self-determination. Before the Madrid Principles, that place was the Soviet Union, after the Madrid principles – Azerbaijan. By the Madrid principles, Armenia has recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan,” Pashinyan added.

He noted that the “greatest omission” of their government was the failure to explain this to the people after 2018.