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A former member of parliament in Azerbaijan received a three-year jail sentence on December 2 after a trial based on video footage of her offering to sell a seat in the legislature. The conviction of Gular Ahmadova is a rare example of a leading official being held to account in Azerbaijan, although some believe more than just one person should have been prosecuted, reads the article published on the site of British Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).

According to the article the story broke in September 2012, when Elshad Abdullayev, formerly rector of the Azerbaijan International University, told journalists that Ahmadova had demanded payment to secure him a seat in parliament. He released a hidden-camera film showing a conversation involving him, Ahmadova and a woman called Sevinj Babayeva in the run-up to the 2005 parliamentary election. In the video, Ahmadova hinted that the sum of one million US dollars was not for her but for Ramiz Mehdiyev, head of the Azerbaijani president’s office.

As Abdullayev says to IWPR “It’s the first time in this country that an official has been arrested and made to face responsibility.”

Muzaffar Bakhish, a lawyer, told IWPR that the sentence could have been up to 12 years, so in reality Ahmadova got off lightly, especially considering the large sum of money she was accused of demanding.

Azerbaijani opposition politician Fuad Gahramanli, deputy head of the Popular Front party, told IWPR that the probe should not stop with the end of the trial, and should expand to include others who might be implicated, also those whom Gular Ahmadova passed the money to. “This isn’t just about fraud by Ahmadova; it’s about a state crime, about the falsification of elections through bribery,” he stressed.

RFE/RL notes that both the trial and the sentence handed down to Ahmadova leave many questions open. Neither Abdullayev nor Mehtiyev were summoned to testify.

Some lawyers and human rights activists hypothesize that the court gave Ahmadova an unjustifiably lenient sentence on orders from the presidential administration (for taking the flak on behalf of Mehtiyev? RFE/RL).

At the end of September 2012 a video footage was circulated on the Internet, where Elshad Abdullayev trades with Azerbaijani MP Gular Ahmadova on the bribe sum, which the rector must pay to be "chosen" as an MP. A criminal case, under the article of "fraud”, was opened in Prosecutor's Office of Baku City, after dissemination of the video footage by internet. As a mediator the name of Sevinj Babayeva is mentioned as the third player in the scandalous video, who died on December 27. On the 3rd December Gular Ahmedova was sentenced to three years in prison.