YEREVAN — The leadership of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh), whose people were exiled from their historic homeland by Azerbaijani offensives between 2020 and 2023, is challenging a new order by a judge in Yerevan to vacate the building where they continue to function in exile.
“A historic disgrace: the Republic of Artsakh was deprived of its property,” said the exiled government’s lawyer Roman Yeritsyan in a post to his Facebook page on Tuesday.
The head of the Administrative Court of the Republic of Armenia had approved of a claim filed by the Prosecutor General, demanding that the property belonging to the Artsakh government be struck from the state register and declared invalid.
“I have never seen a more groundless and absurd judicial act than this. I will appeal the decision at the Administrative Court of Appeal,” said Yeritsyan.
He has called for Artsakh people to gather at the Permanent Representation building at 7:30PM on Friday.
Chair of Artsakh’s National Assembly Ashot Danielyan, who currently serves as Acting President, condemned the move in a statement on Wednesday as “shameful, illegal, and immoral”.
“The building of the representative office of the Republic of Artsakh is not just real estate for the people of Artsakh, but it symbolises the statehood of Artsakh.”
“It provides the people of Artsakh, who have been subjected to ethnic cleansing and genocide, with minimal opportunities to gather and coordinate their efforts to protect their rights, defined by the fundamental norms of international law,” he said.
Those efforts include the Swiss Peace Initiative for Nagorno Karabakh, which seeks to create a platform by which representatives of the people of Artsakh could negotiate with Azerbaijan for their right to return in an internationally supervised format.
Danielyan vowed, “these anti-Armenian actions will not break our will to restore the rights of the people of Artsakh, violated by war crimes and crimes against humanity, to return to Artsakh and restore their statehood”.
Rewriting history
The campaign to seize the exiled republic’s property comes in the context of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s ongoing campaign to deny the historic Christian Armenian character of Artsakh.
On the campaign trail for 7 June parliamentary elections, Pashinyan told one audience that the mountainous land where the Armenian script was first taught at the fourth-century Amaras Monastery was “never ours”.
Notably, the judge who made the 25 May ruling refused to involve the Republic of Artsakh in the case as a third party, contributing to a dual effort by Baku and Yerevan to essentially write the republic out of the record books.
Artsakh refugees, who for decades held Republic of Armenia passports, have been de facto denaturalised since arriving to Armenia — told that their passports were never legitimate citizenship documents and that they must apply for new documents.
The move to dispossess the Republic of Artsakh also follows other politically-motivated seizures.
Pashinyan’s government in the past year has resorted to taking over private businesses as a means to solidify control and quell dissent — or at least raise the cost for opposition.
The most notable target has been Russian-Armenian tycoon Samvel Karapetyan, who spoke out last year in defence of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
He was subsequently punished with the ongoing seizure of the Electric Networks of Armenia. Karapetyan is now leading a new political party challenging Pashinyan from house arrest.
Pashinyan on the campaign trail this month also vowed to seize the Ararat Cement factory of businessman Gagik Tsarukyan, who leads another major opposition party.
In the words of Harutiun Kassakhian, a US lawyer of Armenian descent, the Armenian government under Pashinyan has “weaponised the government’s expropriation of private property”.
“These seizures are similar to the Young Turks’ illegal seizure of Ottoman Armenians’ properties during the 1915 Armenian Genocide, described in the book The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide by Taner Akçam and Ümit Kurt,” Kassakhian told CSI.
“Armenia under PM Pashinyan wants to forcibly take private companies’ and even an unrecognized government’s properties in repeated, shameless and bold violations of the European Convention on Human Rights’ Protocol 1, Article 1.”
Representation in exile
With its 150,000 inhabitants forced from their historic homeland, the Permanent Representation of the Republic of Artsakh is one of the last institutions — alongside its Church diocese — which continues to exist and function in Armenia.
The courtyard of the stately building displays a massive banner with the faces of the Armenian hostages held in Baku, from Artsakh’s civilian and military leadership to regular civilians who were taken captive in 2020 and 2023.
Their faces are a living reminder of Azerbaijan’s intolerance for the self-determination of the Armenian people in their historic homeland, which is now targeting Armenia itself.
Prime Minister Pashinyan has at times tied his rejection of the Artsakh refugees’ right of return to the idea that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev would reciprocate and halt his designs on Armenia.
However, Baku has only strengthened its state support for the concept of a “return” of Azeris to “Western Azerbaijan” – an ahistoric toponym which it has grafted onto all of Armenia.
Azerbaijan’s highest Muslim religious authority in May 2025 went so far as to claim Etchmiatzin, where the Mother See of the Armenian Apostolic Church is located, as “historic Azerbaijani land”.
Sheikh-ul-Islam Pashazada appointed a “ghazi”—a title associated with Islamic conquest — to eventually “oversee the affairs of Azerbaijanis living in ‘Western Azerbaijan’”.
Azerbaijani President Aliyev in May 2025 told reporters that settling 300,000 Azerbaijanis in Armenia was not a question of if but “when” for his government.
