Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan adopted the Law on Humanitarian Demining Activities in February 2025, but has not yet adopted its revised national standards (ANMAR) and a new national mine action strategy. Azerbaijan continues to scale up a massive clearance effort of mines and explosive remnants of war (ERW), including cluster munition remnants (CMR). In 2024, the Mine Action Agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan (ANAMA) reported releasing more than 51km² of cluster munition-contaminated area through clearance and technical survey (TS), with the destruction of 2,882 submunitions.Email from Nariman Gasimov, Deputy Head of International Relations Department, ANAMA, 7 June 2025. These figures, however, are based on the total size of area for task polygons in which submunitions were found during land release as ANAMA does not disaggregate cluster munition tasks from other battle area clearance (BAC) or mine clearance. In order to avoid inflating CMR clearance data, Mine Action Review has estimated that the amount of land actually containing CMR released through clearance in 2024, was 12km². This estimated figure is nonetheless a 50% increase on the previous year.

• Azerbaijan should commit to never again use cluster munitions and should accede to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) as a matter of priority.
• ANAMA should work to establish a nationwide baseline of CMR-contaminated area using evidence-based non-technical survey (NTS) and TS.
• ANAMA should ensure that CMR survey, clearance, and contamination data are disaggregated from data relating to other ERW and mines.
• Azerbaijan should adopt the revised National Mine Action Standards (NMAS) without delay and allow cancellation of areas through NTS, which is not permitted under existing standards.
• ANAMA should elaborate a separate methodology for clearing CMR, distinct from BAC, ensuring that the footprint of a cluster strike is identified and that clearance is conducted to an appropriate fade-out distance.
• ANAMA should finalise and adopt a new draft mine action strategy to replace the one that expired in 2018, reflecting the significant increase in explosive ordnance (EO) contamination now under Azerbaijan’s control.

Click here to download the full "Clearing Cluster Munition Remnants 2025" report for Azerbaijan.