More than 16,000 displaced people from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) have received Armenian citizenship
More than 16,000 displaced people from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) have received Armenian citizenship, says the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs
05.09.2025
Article published on the arka.am website
As of 2 September this year, more than 16,000 Armenian citizenship applications have been received from people displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh, according to Armen Ghazaryan, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs.
In a statement, Ghazaryan said that 11,259 of them had been granted citizenship by Presidential decree, as well as more than 5,000 minors, who automatically qualified when their parents renewed their passports.
The Minister added that citizenship applications can be made in all regions of the republic and that the number of documentation hubs had been increased to cope with the demand.
“The timescale for processing citizenship submissions from displaced persons will be quicker than is normally the case”, he said, explaining that compatriots from Karabakh would be granted citizenship within two months, as opposed to the standard 90 days.
Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing in Artsakh
On 19-20 September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a full-scale assault on Artsakh, using artillery, drones and combat aircraft. On the 28th, following negotiations with official Azerbaijan representatives, Artsakh’s President Samvel Shahramanyan issued a decree stating that all the republic’s State institutions were to be dissolved and that the republic of Artsakh would cease to exist from 1 January 2024.
The residents of Artsakh were forced to leave their homeland and move to Armenia, with more than 115,000 now registered in the country. The Armenian Government is providing help by implementing a number of programmes, including the https://e-soc.am platform to deal with people’s basic needs and has established a Ministry of Social Affairs’ hotline number of “114”.
