A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian gave no details of the visit when she confirmed it to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. The FIS issued no statements on it in the following hours. According to the flight-tracking website FlightRadar24, a commercial plane that took Grigorian to Baku was due to return to Yerevan late in the evening.
The director of Armenia’s National Security Service, Andranik Simonian, visited the Azerbaijani capital for the same purpose one year ago. No details of that visit were made public.
The Armenian officials attended the Baku forum despite the Azerbaijani authorities’ continuing refusal to free Armenian prisoners. At least 19 of them remain in Azerbaijani captivity more than a year after an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal was initialed in Washington. They include eight former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh who were captured in 2023 by Azerbaijan’s State Security Service, the forum’s organizer.
Grigorian served as Armenia’s human rights ombudswoman before becoming the FIS director in 2023. Her government-backed successor, Anahit Manasian, was criticized by one of the jailed former Karabakh leaders, Ruben Vardanyan, earlier this year for essentially dismissing his calls to try to visit the prisoners together with their relatives.
Vardanyan has repeatedly accused the Armenian government of being indifferent to their fate. Another captive, former Karabakh parliament speaker Davit Ishkhanian, has gone farther, saying that Yerevan does not want Baku to free them.