An Azerbaijani deputy foreign minister has criticized the OSCE Minsk Group as a format for talks on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Karabakh.
"The negotiations in the format of the OSCE Minsk Group have no practical effect on the Karabakh conflict settlement," Khalaf Khalafov said at a briefing in the Azerbaijani embassy in Hungary.
The Azerbaijani deputy minister said that, unlike the UN Security Council, the OSCE adopted non-binding resolutions via consensus, ANS reported.
"This situation allows Armenia to protract the negotiations and ignore four resolutions of the UN Security Council," Khalafov said.
He said that Azerbaijan had the sovereign right to discuss the conflict in other international organizations as the 19 years of negotiations in the Minsk Group format had not yielded practical results.
The Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents are to meet for talks in Sochi on 5 March with the mediation of Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev.
Russia is a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group alongside the USA and France.
The group has been seeking a solution to the conflict, which began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims on the Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenian armed forces occupied a swathe of Azerbaijani territory from 1992, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. Despite a ceasefire in 1994, no long-term peace agreement has been reached. Exchanges of fire remain frequent along the contact line separating the two sides' troops.
The nub of the conflict remains unresolved - the competing claims of territorial integrity, which Azerbaijan insists takes precedence in the case of Karabakh, and self-determination, which Armenia wants to see for the Armenians of Karabakh.
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