The case Armenia built
On 16 September 2021, Armenia instituted proceedings against Azerbaijan at the International Court of Justice -- the principal judicial organ of the United Nations -- under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The application is not vague. It alleges that "Armenians have been subjected to systemic discrimination, mass killings, torture, and other abuse," that these intensified after "Azerbaijan's aggression against Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia" in September 2020, and that "even after the end of hostilities, following a cease-fire which entered into effect on November 10, 2020, Azerbaijan has continued to engage in the murder, torture, and other abuse of Armenian prisoners of war, hostages, and other detained persons."
The case later expanded to the Lachin corridor -- the single road connecting the 120,000 ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to the outside world, which Azerbaijan blockaded. This is the legal record Armenia assembled: an international, treaty-based docket naming the abuses by their names. It exists. It is not propaganda. It is filed at The Hague.
The finding the court actually made
On 22 February 2023, the ICJ ruled -- by a 13-2 vote -- that Azerbaijan must "take all measures at its disposal to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles and cargo along the Lachin corridor in both directions." On the same day, the court unanimously rejected Azerbaijan's counter-request for measures against Armenia over alleged mines. This was a legally binding order from the world's highest court, in Armenia's favour, on the central humanitarian fact of the blockade.
What happened next is the part that matters for any "mutual withdrawal." Azerbaijan did not open the corridor. The blockade continued, and in September 2023 Azerbaijan launched the offensive that emptied Nagorno-Karabakh of virtually its entire Armenian population. The ICJ's order stands as a documented finding that Azerbaijan defied -- and as evidence in any future reckoning. A clause that retires the case retires that finding too.
The other docket: prisoners and the ECHR
The ICJ case is not the only legal avenue. Armenia has also pursued Azerbaijan through the European Court of Human Rights, including inter-state applications and a large body of individual complaints arising from the 2020 war and its aftermath -- the prisoners of war, the hostages, the detained. Azerbaijan, for its part, currently holds 19 Armenians, among them the former political and military leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh, now on trial in Baku. The ECHR track is the venue where the treatment of those detainees, and the deaths and disappearances of others, can still be adjudicated under binding European human-rights law.
These cases are slow, and they are imperfect. But they are the only forums in which the conduct documented since 2020 can be tested by neutral judges and recorded as law rather than as contested narrative. Their value is precisely that they outlast the politics of any given month.
The clause
According to OC Media's review of the draft, the peace treaty initialled in Washington on 8 August 2025 includes a clause prohibiting territorial claims by either side and "another on the withdrawal of legal claims against each other in international courts -- including the issue of the right of return for Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh." OWL's own earlier reporting on the "politics of silence" documented the Armenian government's signalled willingness to drop the ICJ and ECHR cases as part of the settlement. The withdrawal is not a rumour about intentions; it is written into the architecture of the deal Yerevan is pursuing.
Presented at the negotiating table, the clause sounds even-handed: each side drops its cases against the other, clearing the legal underbrush so a treaty can be signed. That symmetry is the selling point. It is also the sleight of hand.
Why "mutual" is not "symmetric"
Two cases withdrawn at once are equal only in number. In substance they are not the same. Armenia's docket is built on a 13-2 ICJ order that Azerbaijan keep a humanitarian corridor open -- an order Azerbaijan ignored on the way to depopulating the territory the corridor served. Azerbaijan's mirror case was, on the central provisional-measures request, rejected by the court unanimously. To "mutually" withdraw is to trade a set of claims the court partly upheld for a set it largely declined, and to call the exchange balanced.
The asymmetry is not only legal but factual. The cases concern documented harms to Armenian prisoners and the forced exodus of a population; retiring them does not make those events un-happen, it makes them legally unaddressed. The 19 Armenians still in Baku do not benefit from their own government withdrawing the human-rights machinery that could one day be invoked on their behalf. Accountability, once dropped, is not easily re-filed.
Who benefits from a closed file
OWL records the government's rationale without distortion: its position is that a final peace requires clearing reciprocal legal claims, and that the no-claims framework is part of normalisation. That is a defensible negotiating theory, and citizens may decide it is worth the price. But they can only decide if the price is named.
So we name it. The verifiable facts are that Armenia holds the stronger legal record -- a binding ICJ order on Lachin, live ECHR proceedings over prisoners and the dead -- and that the draft treaty would have it surrender that record alongside an Azerbaijani case the court mostly rejected. The question is not whether peace is worth pursuing; it plainly is. The question is who gains when the one neutral, binding account of what was done to Armenians is filed away by agreement. A perpetrator's deepest interest is in a closed file. A government that agrees to close it owes its people a clear accounting of what was given up, and of what can never be recovered once the cases are gone.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Republic of Armenia v. Republic of Azerbaijan" (the ICJ case "Application of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Armenia v. Azerbaijan)"; the 16 September 2021 filing and 14-15 October 2021 provisional-measures hearings; Armenia's quoted allegations of systemic discrimination, mass killings, and the torture of prisoners of war, hostages and detainees after the 10 November 2020 ceasefire; the Lachin-corridor blockade of 120,000; the 22 February 2023 binding 13-2 order that Azerbaijan ensure unimpeded movement along the Lachin corridor; and the same-day unanimous rejection of Azerbaijan's counter-request), citing RFE/RL, DW, France 24 and the ICJ. OC Media, "EXCLUSIVE: Azerbaijan's 'Western Azerbaijan' campaign exposed in leaked documents" by Rasmus Canbäck (the draft treaty's clauses prohibiting territorial claims and providing for the withdrawal of legal claims in international courts, including the right of return). The September 2023 depopulation of Nagorno-Karabakh and the figure of 19 Armenians currently held in Azerbaijan are as reported by OC Media (the latter in "Azerbaijani Presidential Aide Hajiyev visits Armenia in historic first" by Arshaluys Barseghyan). The ECHR inter-state and individual proceedings are referenced at a general level. OWL companion reporting: the "politics of silence" investigation on the signalled willingness to drop the ICJ and ECHR cases. OWL editorial framings -- the "mutual is not symmetric" analysis and the closing who-benefits question -- are identified as OWL analysis and kept distinct from the sourced record.