In [juris]prudence, Davit Khachatryan explores the international legal order from Armenia’s vantage point, examining how states, courts, treaties and legal principles shape the world Armenia inhabits. The column looks beyond the headlines to unpack what international law actually says, how it is used and contested, and why it matters for Armenia. Listen to the AI generated audio article. Your browser does not support the audio element. Open a map of Armenia and look at the far south, where Syunik narrows to a strip of land between Nakhchivan and Azerbaijan, with Iran across the Araks River. A route of about 43 kilometers is planned across that strip. The National Assembly has begun its review and on October 21, its Standing Committee on Foreign Relations voted to send it to the floor for a final vote. If approved, a company almost three-quarters owned by the United States, with the remaining quarter owned by the Armenian state, gets the exclusive right to build and operate that route, and keep its commercial income for the next 49 years. The state, meanwhile, will retain revenue from taxes, customs duties and other mandatory fees on trade and transit. Forty-nine years is a long time. A child starting school in Yerevan this autumn will be in their mid-fifties when the first term ends. If the two governments then agree to extend it, as the agreement allows, the second term will end in the next century. The government insists that Armenia will keep full sovereignty over every meter of the route. It is right, and this is what makes the question interesting. Armenia will keep its sovereignty. What will that sovereignty consist of? Like it or not, of all the questions public international law now puts to Armenia, this may be the most pressing. To answer that, it helps to go back eight decades, to the moment the world decided that land should no longer change hands by force, and then to look at what has happened to that promise since. After 1945 In 1945, the states that founded the United Nations wrote a treaty, the UN Charter , which almost every country in the world has since joined. One of its central rules, Article 2(4), forbids states from threatening or using force against another state’s territorial integrity. Territorial integrity is a plain idea in formal words: a state’s land stays whole, and no one may carve pieces off it by force. Lawyers call the body of rules built around this idea jus contra bellum , the law against war. For centuries, war was an accepted tool of statecraft. From the late 19th century, more and more voices pushed against it, but it was still treated as a lawful way of conducting relations between states: the last resort when talks failed. Kings once had ultima ratio regum , “the final argument of kings,” cast on their cannon. Attempts to restrain this, such as the League of Nations in 1919 and the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, which renounced war “as an instrument of national policy,” did not hold. The Charter went much further. It forbade force outright, leaving only two exceptions: self-defense against an armed attack, and action authorized by the UN Security Council. Wars did not stop after 1945. Conquest as a way of acquiring land did, or seemed to. A state could still occupy its neighbor, but the rest of the world would not accept the occupation as a change of ownership. For most of the decades since, borders were treated as settled, and the rule held well enough that few people stopped to think about it. Russia openly challenged that comfort. In 2014, it annexed Crimea, which means it declared a part of Ukraine to be part of Russia. In September 2022, it did the same with four more Ukrainian regions. The UN General Assembly called the annexations invalid. In law, they are. Land taken by force does not belong to whoever took it. Lawyers separate title, the legal right to a territory that other states recognize, from control, the question of who actually runs it. International law can refuse to recognize a conquest for decades. Unfortunately, it cannot return the land to the lawful sovereign. Title can sit in one capital and control in another. Armenians did not need Ukraine to learn this. The whole conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh was a catastrophic clash over title and control. After the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the early 1990s, internationally unrecognized authorities in Artsakh held control for almost three decades. Thirty years of negotiation failed to bring control and title together. The 2020 war and the forced displacement of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians in September 2023 did it instead. Baku presented both as the restoration of its sovereignty. All of this took place in a world where the Charter’s rule was formally intact. The law could not close a gap at the negotiating table; the battlefield did. The Quiet Way Force is the loud way territory comes back into play. There is a quieter way. A state can keep its title and sign away the use of its land. It can lease a port, grant a foreign company a concession to run a railway, or give someone the exclusive right to build and operate a road. The flag stays where it is. Control moves elsewhere, by contract. A well-known example sits on the southeastern tip of Cuba. In 1903, Cuba leased Guantánamo Bay to the United States. The lease recognized Cuba’s “ultimate sovereignty” over the bay. A new treaty in 1934 prolonged the lease until both sides agree otherwise or the United States leaves. Cuba has wanted the base back for more than six decades and has no way to make that happen on its own. It still holds the ultimate sovereignty. The United States still holds the base. Armenia now stands where the loud way and the quiet way meet. In June 2026, it signed a framework agreement with the United States that envisages a joint company controlled by Washington with an exclusive right to build and run a transit route across its south, while border control, customs and policing stay in Armenian hands. The Road From 2020 The idea has its roots in a military defeat. On the night of November 9 to 10, 2020, the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia signed a short statement that ended the 44-day war. Its Article 9 provided that Armenia would guarantee the security of transport connections between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, so that people, vehicles and cargo could move freely in both directions. Control over that transport would be exercised by Russia’s border guards. Baku read Article 9 as a promise of a “corridor” with no Armenian checks along the way. Yerevan insisted that any road would remain under Armenian law. Russia never took up that role, because no route was built. As relations between Yerevan and Moscow cooled, the idea found a new sponsor. In August 2025, at the White House, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan endorsed a transit route across Armenia’s south: the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP. While the purpose is still a route from mainland Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan across Armenian territory, for Armenia, this is the far better arrangement of the two. What the Agreement Says Armenia and the United States will create a joint company, the TRIPP Development Company, registered in Armenia. The United States holds 74% of the shares through a parent company registered in Delaware. Armenia holds the other 26%. The joint company receives the exclusive right to plan, build, operate, and maintain the route in designated zones, and to collect and retain the commercial income it earns, such as infrastructure access and service fees. The first term is 49 years. If both governments agree, it can run for another 50 years, and Armenia’s share then rises to 49%. Armenia cannot build a competing route on the same land, run this one itself, or hand it to a different partner. Company ownership can be changed only by mutual consent. Importantly, the agreement also guarantees that the American parent remains owned and controlled by the United States, with no third party acquiring ownership rights in it, so the American stake stays American. TRIPP is a commercial venture as much as a diplomatic one. The American stake is held through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the government agency that invests public money abroad. It recently approved the company as one of four projects in a $2.5 billion package. The company may set up subsidiaries and bring in further partners for individual projects. This matters for the law. A company is governed by its charter, by contracts and the law of the place where it is registered, and its disputes go to courts and arbitrators. Under TRIPP, the United States is Armenia’s treaty partner and its majority business partner. Much of what will decide the route’s future will be written in corporate documents that are not yet public. Armenia keeps a good deal on paper. Border control, customs, security and policing stay in Armenian hands, which the government repeats at every opportunity. Taxes, customs duties and other mandatory fees on trade and transit stay with the state. The implementation framework describes a “front office” and a “back office.” Private operators hired by the company will deal with travellers and cargo and take their payments. Armenian officials will do their work behind them. International law has dealt with transit across another state’s land before. In the 1950s, Portugal still held two small enclaves inland from Daman, on India’s west coast. To reach them, Portuguese officials and goods had to cross Indian territory. When India blocked the way in 1954, Portugal took the dispute to the International Court of Justice. In 1960, in Right of Passage over Indian Territory (Portugal v India) , the Court gave each side part of what it wanted. Portugal did have a right of passage for civilians and goods, built up through long practice. That right, however, was subject to India’s regulation and control, and India had acted within that control when it closed the way during the unrest. The territorial state kept the last word because it ran the road. TRIPP splits that arrangement. Armenia keeps the right to regulate a road that someone else builds and runs. There is a further layer. The United States and Armenia have had a bilateral investment treaty since the 1990s. Treaties of this kind promise foreign investors fair treatment and protection against expropriation, and let them take the host state to international arbitration if it breaks that promise. The company’s American parent is the kind of investor such treaties are written to protect. Armenia’s powers over borders and customs remain intact under the agreement. The question is what it will cost to use them. A future government may well decide to close a crossing during a crisis, raise fees or tighten inspections. If the measure cuts the company’s income, the company could argue that its investment was treated unfairly and ask a tribunal for damages. Investment treaties from the early 1990s often allow states to take measures they consider necessary for their essential security, and how far such exceptions reach is one of the most argued questions in investment law. The framework agreement may also set out its own way of settling disputes. Either way, the last word would lie with a tribunal, and the price of Armenia’s choices on this strip would be set somewhere other than Yerevan. The Neighbor Across the River One more state has a stake in this strip of land, and it has signed nothing. The route runs close to Armenia’s only border with Iran, the country’s one land link to the south. For years Tehran opposed the “Zangezur corridor,” fearing that a road outside Armenian control would weaken that link. Tehran’s position has softened step by step. In July, days after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visited Tehran, Iran’s ambassador in Yerevan, Khalil Shirgholami, said the Armenian government had assured Tehran that TRIPP and the American presence near the border would pose no threat to Iran. On September 21, at a conference on TRIPP in Yerevan, he said Tehran would not object to the project as long as Armenia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are preserved, its economic interests are taken into account, and any American presence near the border poses no threat to Iran. On October 5, when Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan visited Tehran, President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi still warned against the presence of third parties in the region. By October 16, in Yerevan for the COP17 biodiversity summit, Araghchi said that although Iran has concerns about any American presence in the region, it trusts its Armenian partners and knows they will do nothing against Iran’s security. In law, Iran’s position is straightforward. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties , the 1969 treaty that sets out how treaties themselves work, says in Article 34 that a treaty creates neither obligations nor rights for a state that is not a party to it, unless that state consents. Iran has no veto over TRIPP. Its conditions are still worth a closer look. The first two, respect for Armenia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, are already promised in the agreement. The third concerns an American presence near Iran’s border. The published framework says nothing about a military presence, keeps security, law enforcement and border control with Armenia, and allows only private security personnel working under Armenian license. Mirzoyan has said that Iranian officials asked him precisely whether American troops would be stationed along the route, and he dismissed the media alarm around it as greatly exaggerated. Iran, in other words, has chosen to take Armenia’s assurances on trust. Before Ratifying The National Assembly is already discussing the project. On October 21, Ararat Mirzoyan presented the agreement to the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Foreign Relations. Mirzoyan made the government’s case to the committee on two levels. The first is economic. The route would open passenger and freight links between east and west, let Armenia connect north and south through Azerbaijani territory, where there is no railway link today, and ease supplies and imports from third countries. The second, which he called no less important, is peace. Growing interdependence, in his account, strengthens political stability. On sovereignty, he went through what stays with Armenia: security and law enforcement, border control, customs and migration, the remittance of taxes and duties to the state budget, government data systems and state administration. Mirzoyan highlighted that Azerbaijan will not be able to move weapons along the route. The assurance rests on Article 8 of the agreement, which keeps customs and border control in Armenian hands. The Committee has already approved it and proposed putting the matter before the Parliament. Assurances at that level, given this consistency and clarity, carry weight, deserving to be taken at face value. The economic gains may well come true, and the peace argument is a serious one. Still, the agreement is a compromise born of defeat. While Armenia’s title survives it, the agreement weakens the state’s freedom to decide for itself what happens on that land. Classical international law treated that freedom as close to absolute. Under TRIPP, on this strip of its own territory, Armenia will not act alone. International law does not count this as a loss of sovereignty. A state is sovereign in making its bargains as much as in refusing them. The argument of this column is not that the agreement should be rejected outright. TRIPP may yet prove, and one hopes it will, a win wrung from an almost impossible position. It also comes with hidden risks, and a government that wants to be seen as democratic, and not merely popular, owes its citizens as much openness about them as it puts into promoting the project, whatever the political cost. We opened with the UN Charter, so it is fair to end there. A rule on paper is only as strict as the practice around it. International law grows out of what states do, and out of what other states are willing to accept. Territory is where the law has always been most protective. Since 1945, the rule has been that land must not change hands through force or the threat of force. The Charter says much less about steady, heavy pressure, or a threat in disguise. It is under that kind of pressure, after a lost war, that Armenia has agreed to hand the development of part of its south to someone else for half a century. Nobody will call this a breach of the Charter. It is still one more place where the Charter’s protection runs out before the pressure does. Practice from small places travels further than people assume. In that sense, TRIPP is far from an isolated matter. While Armenians would hardly have chosen to make this kind of contribution to international law, it still shows that what happens to the law elsewhere reaches Armenia, and that what happens in Armenia reaches everywhere else. Stand on that strip of Syunik today, and there is nothing to see. No rails, no customs post, no crossing. The route has no width yet, as the foreign minister put it, because no such thing exists. Everything that will stand there for the next half century is being settled now, and mostly in Yerevan. We are not allowed to point at other capitals anymore. *** Davit Khachatryan specializes in International law and has three LLM degrees, one from Armenia’s State Pedagogical University in Civil Law, followed by a degree from Uppsala University in Investment Treaty Arbitration, and the most recent from the Swedish Defence University in International Operational Law. The post Ultimate Sovereignty appeared first on EVN Report .