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Azerbaijan’s chairmanship of the Council of Europe will put its violations of human rights in the spotlight, writes the secretary-general of the Council of Europe Thorbjørn Jagland in an article published in the site of the European Voice.

According to the publication in recent days the world media much has written about the human-rights situation in Azerbaijan. The focus of attention is Azerbaijan’s chairmanship at the Council of Europe. The question that preoccupies many people is how a country which is known in Western capitals for stifling journalists and locking up opposition activists can chair an organisation whose very aim it is to defend human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

“At the same time, some seem to suggest the Council of Europe is somehow blind to the country’s well-documented rights violations, a point of view I emphatically reject,” the secretary-general reported. He noted that Azerbaijan was accepted into the Council of Europe by its member states in 2001, essentially in the expectation that its membership would contribute to a peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Unfortunately, this hope has not been fulfilled.

According to Jagland, like the European Commission, the United States and many NGOs, the Council of Europe has not held back with warnings over the human-rights situation in Azerbaijan. Only three weeks ago, the Council of Europe’s human-rights commissioner, Nils Muižnieks, issued an update to his previous report of 2013 on the freedom of assembly and expression in the country, in which he expresses his serious concern about the harassment and arrests of journalists. Last year, a delegation of Council of Europe visited Baku and concluded that “substantial progress remains to be accomplished by Azerbaijan” in meeting Council of Europe standards. A resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly similarly voiced major concern over alleged cases of torture and ill-treatment of prisoners.

“Two years after the Eurovision Song Contest in Baku, Azerbaijan will be in the spotlight again during the next six months. I sincerely hope the government and its authorities will use this opportunity to demonstrate their will to improve the country’s human-rights record. Not for the sake of the Council of Europe, but for the sake of the people of Azerbaijan,” concluded the secretary-general of the Council of Europe.