On September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan unleashed a disastrous war in Artsakh, accompanied by war crimes, killings among the civilian population, abductions, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal acts, resulting in the forcible displacement of Artsakh's tens of thousands of Armenians from their historical homeland.

The mass exodus began on September 24 and lasted until October 4. During this period, the entire Armenian population remaining in Artsakh at that time—100,600 people—was forcibly displaced from the Askeran and Martuni districts, the city of Stepanakert, and the villages of the Martakert district.

Even before that—during and after the 44-day war of 2020—as a result of Azerbaijan's Armenophobic policy, its wars of aggression, the targeting and distortion of cultural heritage, and the approximately 10-month blockade of the Lachin Corridor, around 40,000 Artsakh Armenians had already been forcibly displaced.

After these two waves of displacement, Artsakh Armenians temporarily settled in different regions of the Republic of Armenia, concentrating mainly in various towns and communities of Kotayk, Ararat, and Armavir provinces.

As a result of the forced displacement, the connection with Artsakh's nature, monuments, cultural landscape, and communal lifeworld was severed. People were deprived of the vital possibility of direct engagement with this heritage—of preserving it and transmitting it to future generations.

In this context, it should be noted that more than 5,600 monuments have been officially registered in the territory of Artsakh, the majority of which represent Armenian Christian heritage of the 4th–19th centuries. We emphasize that this vast imprint of Armenia's centuries-old tangible and intangible culture is, in itself, an indisputable indicator of the territory's historical-legal affiliation (Petrosyan & Muradyan, 2022, p. 20). The forced removal of Artsakh Armenians from their historical monuments, the direct threats to the very existence of those monuments, and the already considerable volume of destroyed and desecrated cultural assets have created severe—and often insurmountable—challenges to maintaining identity continuity and artistic integrity.

Alongside the socio-economic, humanitarian, and various other problems caused by displacement, Artsakh Armenians have also faced systemic obstacles to the realization of their fundamental rights. In particular, the process of realizing the right to culture has been severely disrupted—this is a basic human right guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and other instruments.

In this case, the right to culture encompasses the person's right to participate in cultural life freely and to live everyday life grounded in their own conceptions, cultural practices, and identity. Specifically, according to General Comment No. 21 on the ICESCR, the right to culture is violated in conditions of destruction, appropriation, or impossibility of access and engagement with cultural monuments.

Since the war, numerous international and national organizations and individuals have documented multiple instances of the systematic destruction of Armenian monuments in Artsakh. In particular, the "Monitoring of the Cultural Heritage of Artsakh" initiative has, since 2021, documented over 220 cases of destruction, appropriation, "Caucasian Albanianization," distortion, alteration, and illegal restoration (see Monitoring of the Cultural Heritage of Artsakh, Alerts). Meanwhile, since 2021, the Caucasus Heritage Watch center has conducted 12 satellite monitoring missions, tracking between 300 and 600 cultural monuments. During this period, 14 cases of destruction were documented (including the historical cemeteries of Sghnakh and Mets Tagher, the Halivor and Makun bridges, the churches Surb Hovhannes Mkrtich/Kanach Zham and Surb Sargis, etc.), as well as damage to 14 additional sites. As of 2025, 30 cultural objects are considered to be under immediate threat (Caucasus Heritage Watch Monitoring Report #8, July 2025).

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in its 2024 and 2025 reports, has emphasized that the entirety of Armenian heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh faces the threat of complete annihilation (pp. 46–48).

These systematic blows against Armenian identity—the destruction and distortion of Artsakh's cultural heritage and the state-level actions undertaken by Azerbaijan for its "Albanianization"—demonstrate that the mechanisms for protecting fundamental human rights under the mandates of the UN, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe conventions, as well as under the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, are presently insufficiently effective. In this context, the resulting impunity creates fertile ground for Azerbaijan to commit new crimes and to "legitimize" those already committed. The international community, which is called upon to protect cultural diversity and the shared heritage of humanity, is, in effect, unable to prevent these crimes