Mammadyarov: "Azerbaijan hopes for progress in Karabakh conflict settlement this year"

Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov gave an interview to The Korea Times, an English-language daily newspaper of South Korea.
The Azerbaijani minister spoke about the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan's foreign policy this year.

News.Az presents the interview as following.

Q: What are the results of the ongoing negotiations on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict? How do you see their prospects, especially against the background of recent encouraging statements?

A: The position of my country regarding the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has been repeatedly stated at the highest level within all platforms. The conflict must be resolved on the basis of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan within its internationally recognized borders. Coming to the legal basis of the settlement, it is necessary to recall that this basis consists primarily of the four resolutions of the U.N. Security Council, a body responsible for ensuring peace and security worldwide, adopted in 1993, numerous resolutions and decisions of other international organizations, including the OSCE, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Non-Aligned Movement, NATO, the European Parliament and etc, as well as joint documents adopted in bilateral and multilateral formats.

Unfortunately, negotiations held over the years haven't yielded any results. But the recent developments taking place in Armenia, the conversations that took place between the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, as well as four meetings with my Armenian counterpart create certain grounds for advancing the negotiation process. The press statement by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs released on the latest meeting of the Foreign Ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia in Paris on Jan. 16, 2019 expressed appreciation for the ongoing efforts of the sides to maintain an environment conducive to intensive results-oriented negotiations. It stated the agreement of both sides upon the necessity of taking concrete measures to prepare the populations for peace. The statement also outlines that the sides considered next steps toward a possible summit between the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia in order to give a strong impulse to the dynamic of negotiations. Here I would like to be clear that Azerbaijan stands for tangible results of the negotiations, not talks for the sake of talks and this is our principled position.