
Armenia pleaded with judges of the United Nations' highest court on Monday to order Azerbaijan to break up a road blockade that is isolating the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, calling the action part of an act of “ethnic cleansing.”
The hearing at the International Court of Justice comes amid rising tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia just over two years after they ended a war that killed about 6,800 soldiers and displaced around 90,000 civilians. Nagorno-Karabakh is within Azerbaijan but had been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since the end of a separatist war in 1994.