Nagorno-Karabakh

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Wednesday 7th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness’s work in this area; I know that her charity HART does a lot of work in Nagorno-Karabakh. We are taking an active role in this as best we can. We are working with a number of our like-minded partners within the OSCE, as I mentioned, and we are working within the UN Security Council and NATO to try to bring about a de-escalation. On sovereignty, the UK supports the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of Azerbaijan, while underlining the importance of the UN and OSCE principles. We support the OSCE Minsk Group process and the basic principles that sit beneath it, including a return of the occupied territories and the acceptance of the free expression of will on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to return briefly to my noble friend Lady Ramsay’s point about the vacuum that has been created. We have all the statements in the world saying, “Stop this war”, but we had a process—the Minsk process—we had talks, and we even had a framework agreement. What is the noble Baroness doing to ensure the United States returns all its efforts back to that process so that that vacuum is not filled by other players in the region?

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

My Lords, we support the role that the US is playing in the Minsk process; I mentioned before the strong statements from the President and the Secretary of State on this issue. We believe that the Minsk process is the best way to bring about an end to this conflict. The role of that group is to facilitate the negotiations—as I said, it has proposed a set of basic principles—but it is for the parties themselves to negotiate a peace agreement. We recognise that that must involve compromise and hard choices, but there is no military solution. We need the parties to return to the negotiation table, with the help of the co-chairs—the US, France and Moscow—and we believe that that is the best way to bring about an end to this conflict.