By Sara Rajabova

The transit of drugs is a problem faced by the entire world, but for Azerbaijan, the difficulties are that a large amount of drugs is transported through the territories occupied by Armenia, a senior Azerbaijani official told media on Monday.

Deputy Prime Minister Ali Hasanov, who chairs the State Commission on the Fight against Drug Addiction and Illicit Drug Trafficking, said that the volumes of cargo turnover are increasing as the country is developing.

"The number of those entering and leaving the country as well as the implemented international projects is increasing, as is the number of tourists," he said. "All this creates the conditions for the global drug business to use the country as a transit direction. But we have intensified our activity. All state bodies were mobilized to prevent the transit of drugs. However, the biggest challenge for us is that a large volume of drugs is transported through the Azerbaijani occupied lands, which we cannot control."

Over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions, has been occupied by Armenian armed forces since a lengthy war in the early 1990s. The UN Security Council has adopted four resolutions on Armenia's withdrawal from the Azerbaijani territory, but they have not been enforced to this day.

Earlier, Hasanov said that because of the lack of proper control, the occupied territories of Azerbaijan are used as transit territory for trafficking in narcotics from Afghanistan to the CIS countries and Europe.

Hasanov said that there are three routes of illicit drug transit across the country: Afghanistan-Pakistan-Iran-Azerbaijan, Afghanistan-Iran-Azerbaijan and Afghanistan-Central Asia-Azerbaijan. He added that there is also another illicit drug transit route which is not included in the map of international illicit drug transit routes and that is the Afghanistan-Iran-Nagorno-Karabakh route.

Given the urgency of the problem of controlling illicit trafficking, intensive work is underway in Azerbaijan to establish legal basis for combating these types of crimes.

Azerbaijan has joined the 1961, 1971 and 1988 UN conventions on narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and the fight against illegal circulation of precursors, and concluded bilateral and multilateral agreements and memoranda with a number of countries on combating drugs.

Besides the three UN conventions, Azerbaijan is party to the Partial Agreement establishing the Pompidou Group of the Council of Europe on cooperation in combating drug abuse and trafficking in drugs.