Azerbaijan has appealed to the International Court of Justice to stop its neighbor Armenia from planting land mines in the Karabakh territory it once occupied and hand over information about the location of existing mines, booby traps and other explosives, according to a statement from the U.N. body Thursday.

Azerbaijan said "new evidence" had emerged that Armenia deliberately continued to lay land mines in "civilian zones in which displaced Azerbaijanis are slated to return" in its request for provisional measures in a case that has lasted years.

The court said Azerbaijan had asked it to order Armenia to take all necessary steps for the safe demining of towns and to "immediately cease to plant or to support the planting of land mines and booby traps."

Karabakh is a source of a decadeslong conflict between the South Caucasus neighbors. The territory is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but was illegally occupied by Armenia for three decades until 2020.

Baku and Yerevan fought two wars over the territory in the 1990s and again in the autumn of 2020 when six weeks of particularly intense clashes claimed over 6,500 lives before a Russian-brokered truce ended the hostilities.

Under the 2020 deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory, and Russia stationed a force of 2,000 peacekeepers in the region to oversee a fragile truce.

Baku has since been leading a reconstruction push in the region where dozens of Azerbaijani cultural and religious monuments, mosques and homes had been destroyed by Armenia. President Ilham Aliyev previously revealed that clearing the mines planted by Armenia, nearing 1 million according to preliminary estimates, would take nearly 30 years and would cost $25 billion.

The request by Azerbaijan is part of tit-for-tat cases filed at the World Court in 2021, where both Armenia and Azerbaijan have claimed the other country had violated the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which both states are signatories.

In emergency measures, the World Court in that year ordered both countries to prevent the incitement of racial hatred against each other's nationals and to not do anything to aggravate the dispute while the court considered the case.

It was not clear if the court would hear the request for new provisional measures.

The World Court in The Hague, formally known as the International Court of Justice, is the U.N. court for resolving disputes between countries.

At the end of 2022, tensions flared up again between the rival nations, this time involving the blockade of the Lachin Corridor in Karabakh where since mid-December, a group of Azerbaijani activists has been protesting illegal mining that has been causing environmental damage in the region. The protests erupted after representatives of Azerbaijan attempting to visit the areas where mineral resources are being illegally exploited were barred access to the area.

Yerevan has been accusing Azerbaijan of creating a "humanitarian catastrophe" by purposefully blocking the only road linking Armenia to the region, which houses thousands of Armenians. It also slammed the Russian peacekeeping contingent for "failing to fulfill its purpose of clearing the corridor."

Baku has consistently rejected Yerevan’s accusations, with Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov stressing that obstacles to the use of the road are created by people who introduced themselves as "the leaders of local Armenians" and claims that the protests on the Lachin road posed the threat of a humanitarian crisis to the local Armenian population are baseless.

"Movement of citizens, vehicles and goods along the road remains unchanged. Furthermore, there are no obstructions to the supply of goods for the use of local residents or the necessary medical services," his office informed.

According to the trilateral memorandum of January 2021, Armenia must remove its forces from liberated lands in Karabakh where Baku says Yerevan is "abusing the Lachin road for military provocations and obstructing the opening of all transport communications" in the region.

Kremlin, as a longtime mediator, also expressed concern over the situation in the disputed corridor, urging the sides to "strictly comply with all the provisions of the Statement of the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia dated Nov. 9, 2020."

Noting that "provocations" against Russian peacekeepers were "unacceptable" and would "harm" the process of Azerbaijani-Armenian normalization, Moscow assured it would continue taking "consistent steps to resolve the situation."