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Prisoners in Azerbaijan are mistreated, parliamentary debate is “nearly impossible” and the activities of the opposition are “noticeably restricted” through measures that even include “state repression.” This is, as the well-known German weekly magazine “Spiegel” reports, the exact wording used by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany in its confidential report about the latest situation in Azerbaijan. The report criticizes the “state repression” in the country.

The magazine notes that the confidential document describes Azerbaijan as a country whose state organs have “abused arrested individuals in police custody,” and the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest will be held there later this May. “Rarely has the regime of Azerbaijan's autocratic ruler Ilham Aliyev, the son of the longtime president and former KGB general Heydar Aliyev, enjoyed such international attention as now, as musicians from 42 countries prepare to head there for the competition. And rarely have opinions about the country on the Caspian Sea been as sharply divided,” “Spiegel” writes.

When Europeans turn their attention to Azerbaijan, their biggest complaint is violations of human rights, while American strategists take a more pragmatic approach, the German publication writes. A $1.6 billion arms deal between Azerbaijan and Israel, apparently, worries them more than the report of prisoners whose arrests “clearly have a political background” mentioned in the German MFA's situation report.

“A 2009 telegram from the US Embassy in Baku to the State Department in Washington compared the Azerbaijani president to fictional mafia bosses from the “Godfather” films. Is it nevertheless possible to negotiate with someone like Aliyev, if only for the sake of a song contest?” “Spiegel” writes, noting that Azerbaijan is a member of the Council of Europe and submits to the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.

The publication notes that because Aliyev is well connected throughout the continent, his opponents only have one stage to express their disapproval: it's the Eurovision in Baku. Volker Herres, the program director of Germany's ARD television network, said that the ARD studio in Moscow, responsible for covering the song contest, will cover the abuses in Azerbaijan ahead of Eurovision.