The Artsakh Human Rights Defender Urges Google Not to Yield to Azerbaijani Provocations

The Human Rights Defender of Artsakh, Gegham Stepanyan, has sent a letter to Google, urging the company not to yield to Azerbaijani provocations. In his letter, Stepanyan called on Google to disregard the baseless demands presented by Azerbaijan and to refrain from removing Armenian place names from digital maps of Artsakh.

The defender emphasized that Azerbaijan's efforts are yet another manifestation of its long-standing policy to deprive the people of Artsakh of their homeland and reject their Armenian identity. He recalled that the aggression unleashed by Azerbaijan against the people of Artsakh in the autumn of 2020, aimed at the occupation of the entire region and the destruction of its population, marked the peak of Azerbaijan's criminal policies.

To ensure the fictitious legality of its claims over Artsakh, Azerbaijan deliberately erases, destroys, and eliminates any trace of Armenians and Armenian culture and history from every square centimeter of the territory under its control. The true motives behind Azerbaijan's demands to remove Armenian place names from maps can be easily identified; Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) is not merely a place name but an embodiment of Armenian culture and history.

Armenian place names are memories of the land, as well as living memories of the people who gave those names to those places. Such place names serve as symbols of regional culture and reflect the history and environment of the area. The demand to remove Armenian place names from maps is nothing more than an attempt to create a desired reality on the maps in order to further its criminal policies.

In his letter, the defender presented the provisions of international law that affirm the rights of peoples to freely use, preserve, and inherit their place names. He highlighted that international law does not consider place names and geographic designations as the property of states but rather as intangible heritage belonging to peoples.

Gegham Stepanyan pointed out that the removal of Armenian place names would only encourage Azerbaijan’s gross violations of the rights of the people of Artsakh and assist in legitimizing the consequences of the illegal use of force. Praising the company’s people-centric approach expressed through the use of Armenian place names on maps, the Human Rights Defender expressed confidence that the company would reject Azerbaijan's ongoing attempts to alter the maps and carry out ethnic cleansing against the people of Artsakh.