Displaced Armenians rally in front of the Swiss embassy on March 13, 2025.
Key points:
- A year and a half after Azerbaijan expelled them, the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) are united in their desire to return to their homeland.
- The vast majority are refusing to take Armenian citizenship, and as they fear losing their connection to their homeland.
- The Republic of Artsakh’s institutions continue to function in exile in Armenia.
- Switzerland has committed to holding a peace forum where Karabakh Armenians will be represented, and the right of return will be negotiated.
Joel Veldkamp, Director for Public Advocacy – CSI
This piece is adapted from a German-language piece prepared by the author for the forthcoming Jahrbuch Religionsfreiheit 2025, published by the International Institute for Religious Freedom.
In September 2023, Azerbaijan carried out one of the most thorough ethnic cleansing campaigns in modern history. Of the 120,000 Armenian Christians who lived in Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) on September 18, 2023 – and the 150,000 who lived there in 2020 – only 14 remain today. 23 more are held as hostages in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
It would not be surprising if, in the face of Azerbaijan’s military and economic power and international apathy, the Karabakh Armenians decided to give up on their homeland. Yet the exiled Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, by all indications, remain united in their determination to return.
The campaign for return has met with either hostility or indifference from most governments. But it has received support from some quarters of the Armenian diaspora, and some Christian human rights groups in the United States and Europe. And these efforts have borne fruit in an unexpected place: Switzerland.
A demand for return
International law is clear – the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh have the right to return to their homeland. The International Court of Justice ordered in a ruling on 17 November 2023 that Azerbaijan must allow the Karabakh Armenians to return home in a “safe, unimpeded and expeditious manner.”
There is little appetite to uphold this right within the international comunity. The prevailing reaction from the United States and the European Union to the ethnic cleansing campaign in 2023 seemed to be relief. Western diplomats hoped that, with Nagorno Karabakh obliterated and the source of the conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijan eliminated, Armenia and Azerbaijan could end their long-running conflict and sign a peace treaty. This in turn would facilitate Armenia’s political shift towards the West, and make it easier for the West to access Azerbaijani energy resources.
Before the ethnic cleansing, the United States had pressured the Armenian government to recognize Nagorno Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan. As the former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan Matthew Bryza commented on December 7, 2023, “the end of…a separatist political authority in Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region removed the last obstacle to the peace treaty.”
The Armenian government seems equally determined to close the Karabakh question. The Armenian Foreign Ministry insists that Karabakh has been “removed from the agenda” of its peace talks with Azerbaijan. The speaker of Armenia’s parliament, Alen Simonyan, has declared, “Legally, Nagorno-Karabakh does not exist as an entity.”
The elected government of Nagorno Karabakh, however, insists otherwise. It meets in exile in Armenia, and continues to claim their people’s right to self-determination.
It has been widely misreported that the Republic of Artsakh “ceased to exist” on January 1, 2024. In fact, on September 26, Azerbaijani troops forced the President of Artsakh, Samvel Shahramanyan, to sign a decree dissolving the Republic of Artsakh, effective January 1, 2024. But once his people were safely in Armenia, President Shahramanyan withdrew his decree dissolving the Republic, and acknowledged that, under Artsakh’s constitution, it had not been a legal decree in the first place. Artsakh was created through an act of self-determination of its people. Only a similar act could legitimately dissolve it.
By all appearances, the vast majority of Karabakh Armenians agree. One good indicator of this is how few Karabakh Armenians have applied for citizenship in the Republic of Armenia. As of December 2024, only 6,338 of the 115,358 registered refugees from Nagorno Karabakh in Armenia have applied for Armenian citizenship. This is despite the fact that the Armenian government has promised additional financial support for Karabakh Armenians who take citizenship.
Before the ethnic cleansing, Karabakh Armenians were given passports by the Armenian government on which only a unique number code – 070 – showed that they were from Artsakh, not Armenia. For many Karabakh Armenians, these 070 passports are precious, tangible signs of their connection to their homeland. They are loath to give them up.
Legally speaking, taking Armenian citizenship would not affect Karabakh Armenians’ right to return to their homeland. That right stands whether or not they make a new home for themselves in another country.
Nevertheless, Karabakh Armenians appear to have collectively decided that taking Armenian citizenship would send the wrong message – that, like the Armenian government, the U.S., and the EU, they are ready to forget their homeland. At significant cost to themselves, they are refusing to send that message.
Pursuing the right of return
On December 2, 2023, the National Assembly of Artsakh in exile in Armenia created the “Committee for the Defense of the Fundamental Rights of the People of Nagorno Karabakh.” This seven-member committee is headed by Vartan Oskanian, who served as Armenia’s foreign minister from 1998 to 2008.
According to the Committee’s official narrative, its purpose is to “advocate, pursue, and negotiate with all stakeholders, including state parties, for the safe and secure repatriation of the people of Nagorno Karabakh to their homes under joint international administration and protection, overseen by either the UN or the OSCE and with the presence of a peacekeeping operation.”
The Committee has found allies for its mission in civil society in the U.S. and Europe – mostly among organizations in the Armenian diaspora and Christian anti-persecution NGOs.
In July 2024, Christian Solidarity International brought members of the Committee to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva to make their case for the right of return. The Azerbaijani delegation to the UN reacted furiously, lodging a formal complaint against Christian Solidarity International at the UN’s Committee on NGOs, accusing it of referring to “part of Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory” “with fictitious or invalid names” – meaning: Nagorno Karabakh
But in Switzerland, an unlikely alliance heard the Committee’s message, and decided to take action.
Switzerland’s initiative for the right of return
On October 15, 2024, two members of Switzerland’s National Council – the lower house of its national parliament – introduced Motion 24.4259: “Peace forum for Nagorno Karabakh: To enable the return of the Armenians.”
The motion, if approved, would require Switzerland’s Federal Council – the country’s highest executive body – “to organize an international peace conference on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict” within a year’s time. The goal of this peace forum would be “an open dialogue between Azerbaijan and representatives of the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian people, conducted under international supervision or in the presence of internationally relevant actors, to negotiate the safe and collective return of the historically resident Armenian population.”
The motion represents a uniquely Swiss approach to the issue. Rather than simply supporting the Karabakh Armenians’ right of return, the initiative reflects Switzerland’s long history as a trusted mediator between conflicting parties.
And most importantly, the motion requires the Federal Council to give a platform to the very people that the United States, the European Union, the Armenian government and the Azerbaijani government have tried to marginalize: “the representatives of the Nagorno Karabakh Armenian people.”
The cause received support from across Switzerland’s political and linguistic landscape. The members of parliament who introduced the motion were Erich Vontobel, a member of the right-wing Eidgenössisch-Demokratische Union from German-speaking Zurich, and Nicolas Walder, a member of the left-wing Green Party from French-speaking Geneva.
Nevertheless, there was much reason to doubt that the motion could succeed in the Swiss parliament. Azerbaijan wields considerable financial and political influence in many Western countries, and Switzerland is no exception. SOCAR (the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic) has its headquarters in Geneva, and hundreds of SOCAR petrol stations dot the Swiss landscape. In July 2024, the then-head of Switzerland’s Federal Council, Viola Amherd, was photographed sharing a friendly chat with Ilham Aliyev at a meeting in Oxford. Aliyev’s press office reported that the two had discussed “the contributions of Swiss companies to the restoration and construction efforts in Azerbaijan’s liberated territories” – that is, in ethnically-cleansed Nagorno Karabakh.
However, to the surprise even of some of its supporters, the motion moved steadily through the Swiss parliament, receiving a healthy majority each time it was put to a vote. After the National Council’s foreign policy commission approved the motion, the Azerbaijani government sent a threatening letter to the commission’s members, promising “irreversible damage” to Swiss-Azerbaijani relations if the motion was not withdrawn.
If anything, this threat seems to have emboldened Swiss parliamentarians. On 17 December 2024, the lower house of the Swiss parliament approved the motion, sending the question to the upper house, the Council of States.
On March 13, five days before the final vote, displaced Armenians from Nagorno Karabakh rallied in front of the Swiss embassy in Yerevan, thanking Switzerland for its support, and urging the upper house to approve the motion. Swiss foreign minister Ignazio Cassis, however, argued to the Council of States that there was no need for Switzerland to hold a peace forum, since Azerbaijan and Armenia had not asked Switzerland to do so.
Cassis’ argument was either a misunderstanding of the issue, or a deliberate distortion of it. The purpose of motion 24.4259 is not to support bilateral peace talks between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan, but to give a platform to the displaced Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, whose rights, interests, and representatives have been very deliberately excluded from the Western-led peace talks.
The Swiss parliamentarians remained firm. The final vote in the upper house was decisive: 29 in favor, 12 against, 2 abstaining.
An opening?
Despite this progress, the right of return remains a distant prospect for Karabakh’s Armenians. Even if the Swiss government makes genuine efforts to organize a peace forum as mandated, Azerbaijan will almost certainly not participate unless pressured by more powerful actors. Azerbaijan has shown no indication that it is ready to allow the Armenians to return to their homes. Indeed, Azerbaijan is actively destroying Armenian neighborhoods, villages, and churches across Nagorno Karabakh.
However, the geopolitics of Eurasia are in great flux. United States President Donald Trump, who returned to power in January 2025, has publicly expressed his support for the people of Artsakh. He has also launched an effort to reduce U.S. defense commitments in Europe and reach an understanding with Russia over regional security.
One area where the U.S. and Russia might find common ground is in the quest for a sustainable peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan – a peace built not on ethnic cleansing, but on justice and respect for human rights.
If they do, Switzerland’s peace forum will be an ideal vehicle for this, and the people of Nagorno Karabakh will be ready.
