Azerbaijan on Thursday filed a case at the United Nations' top court accusing neighboring Armenia of a "policy of ethnic cleansing" targeting Azerbaijanis.
The case was lodged at the International Court of Justice a week after Armenia filed suit against Azerbaijan at the same Hague-based world court, accusing Baku of a "state-sponsored policy of Armenian hatred."
Both cases focus on the two countries' decades-long territorial dispute that erupted into armed conflict again last year, leaving hundreds dead.
The legal dispute is the latest battle over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan that has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by the Armenian government for more than a quarter of a century.
The predominantly Armenian-populated region had an autonomous status within Azerbaijan during the Soviet era. Tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris boiled over as the Soviet Union collapsed. Conflict broke out in 1988 when the region tried to join Armenia, and escalated into war after the 1991 collapse of the USSR, leaving an estimated 30,000 dead and displacing about 1 million.
