By Ayya Lmahamad

Baku has sent a letter to Google over the distorted names of Azerbaijani territories liberated from the Armenian occupation displayed on Google Maps.

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Leyla Abdullayeva made the remarks in an interview with local media.

She stressed that the issue was raised before Google through diplomatic channels that the geographical maps in the Google Maps app contain distorted names in Armenian along with the official names in Azerbaijani of the territories of Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region.

"A letter was sent to the management of the company about the distortion of the toponyms of Azerbaijani territories. The list of official geographic names of the corresponding territories of Azerbaijan was sent to the opposite side," she said.

Abdullayeva recalled that in May 2021, at the annual session of the UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry presented a national report, prepared jointly with the Ecology and Natural Resources Ministry.

"The report contained a list of officially approved and standardized names of 4,589 settlements in Azerbaijani, English and Russian languages, as well as the names of 125 geographical objects located in the territories affected by the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict,” she said.

The spokesperson underlined that according to the resolutions adopted within the framework of the UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, it is inadmissible to make changes in standardized geographical names by the authorized state structure of any country, and these changes cannot be recognized by the UN.

“As for the Google Maps platform, I would like to point out that it operates on the principle of individual appeals from users. From this point of view, written feedback from citizens and non-governmental organizations to the company is extremely important,” she said.

“This issue is currently the focus of attention, and measures continue to be taken to correct misrepresentations,” she added.