Chair of the Milli Majlis Sahiba Gafarova who is in Italy on an official visit currently met with Chairman of the Chamber of Deputies of Italy Roberto Fico at Palazzo Montecitorio in Rome on 19 May.

Roberto Fico greeted the Azerbaijani delegation and said he was glad of the meeting with the Chair of the Milli Majlis. He went on to talk about the high ebb of the relations between our countries and to highlight the broad range of topics that are to be discussed amongst the two sides. Mr Fico also touched on the completion of the Highland Garabagh Conflict and said he believed that the arrived peace would be sustainable.

The Chair of the Milli Majlis thanked Mr Fico for the cordial welcome and witnessed satisfaction with her first visit to the friendly Italian Republic which is also Azerbaijan’s strategic partner, at that. According to Mrs Gafarova, the visit taking place whilst the world is shrouded in the pandemic spelled the high stature of the relations between Azerbaijan and Italy.

The exchanged visits of the two states’ leaders had created an added momentum behind the growth of the bipartite relations. The Chair of the Milli Majlis made emphatic the state visit of President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan to Italy in 2020 for it had elevated the mutual relations to a new tier qualitatively. The documents signed between the two states constitute the firm legal basis upon which the Azerbaijani-Italian political, economic, cultural and humanitarian ties advance, according to Mrs Gafarova.

The cultural relations are progressing in the spirit of strategic partnership, too, which opinion is underpinned by the official visit to Italy of Azerbaijan’s First Vice President and Chair of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Mrs Mehriban Aliyeva in 2018, the Heydar Aliyev Foundation’s close involvement in the preservation and restoration of monuments of history in Italy, the second Azerbaijani Film Festival conducted in Italy in 2019 and that 2020 was declared The Year of the Azerbaijani Culture in Italy.

Continuing, Speaker Sahiba Gafarova said that the year 2020 was written in the history of Azerbaijan in a golden script because it was during that year that our country liberated its lands after close to 30 years of the Armenian occupation. Having said that, the Chair of the Milli Majlis expressed the deepest gratitude to all the Italian parliamentarians who had voiced their support for the just standpoint of Azerbaijan.

Madame Speaker reiterated that the Garabagh Conflict was over whilst a new period, that of restoration and rebuilding, had begun in the Azerbaijani lands relieved of the Armenian captivity. However, it is necessary to purge those areas of minds for this new period to unfold whereas Armenia is refusing to let Azerbaijan have the minefield maps. This, Sahiba Gafarova remarked, is a war crime by the international laws. The international community, then, should not stay indifference to this, Mrs Gafarova added.

There was a conversation about the matters arousing both parties’ interest during the meeting. They underscored the significance of the continued progress of the interparliamentary dialogue.

The Press and Public Relations Department
The Milli Majlis