France: OSCE MG former co-chair’s statements personal opinion of retired person

/By AzerNews/

By Sara Rajabova

France assessed the statements of a former OSCE Minsk Group co-chair as “a personal opinion of a retired person.”

Eric Fournier, the director of the Department of Continental Europe of the French Foreign Ministry, made this remark in a meeting with Azerbaijani Ambassador to Paris Elchin Amirbayov.

Fournier said France is committed to Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and the statements of Jacques Faure, the former French co-chair of OSCE Minsk Group are nothing more than the personal opinions of a retired person.

Amirbayov told Trend about the meeting and Fournier’s remarks on June 28.

The Azerbaijani embassy had earlier appealed to the French Foreign Ministry regarding the anti-Azerbaijani statements made by Faure on June 19 at the 89th Rose-Roth seminar of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly held in Yerevan.

In Yerevan, he stated that it is impossible to return Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan, according to some Armenian news agencies.

Fournier told Amirbayov that the official position of Paris on the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remains unchanged, and France remains committed to supporting the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

“Jacques Faure is now retired, he does not take up any official position and in no way can express the official position of France. As for the statements by Jacques Faure in Yerevan, even if he made these statements in the way Armenian media reported, they remained unnoticed in Paris, and we must treat them as a personal opinion of a retired person,” Amirbayov said in reference to the senior French diplomat.

For over two decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in a conflict that emerged over Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions.

A fragile ceasefire has been in place since 1994, but long-standing efforts by U.S, Russian and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far.

Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. Security Council's four resolutions on its pullout from Azerbaijan’s internationally-recognized territories.