Journal of Democracy: Azerbaijan successfully bribes European deputies and demonstratively violates CoE norms
When Azerbaijan joined the Council of Europe, it committed itself to resolving the issue of political prisoners as a condition of membership. This matter was initially a top priority for the Council of Europe. In 2001, the secretary-general appointed a team of independent legal experts to examine hundreds of cases of alleged political prisoners in Azerbaijan. PACE appointed special rapporteurs who met prisoners as well as authorities and wrote four hard-hitting reports. PACE passed three resolutions on political prisoners in the country, Gerald Knaus’s article published on the website of Journal of Democracy reads.
According to the article, in 2005, Azerbaijan convinced the Council of Europe not to appoint a new rapporteur on political prisoners. Then it continued to crack down on its critics. In 2007, Azerbaijani human-rights NGOs sent an appeal to the Council of Europe, asking it to appoint a new rapporteur. In March 2009, the Council appointed Social Democrat and Bundestag member Christoph Straesser.
What happened next was unprecedented in the history of the Council of Europe. At first, Azerbaijan tried to shift the Council’s focus, calling for the appointment of a “special rapporteur for a thorough investigation of the problem of political prisoners in Armenia.” Then it changed tactics, arguing that since the Council lacked an agreed-upon definition of “political prisoner,” it could craft no meaningful assessment. Azerbaijani progovernment NGOs published books on this topic and organized international conferences, to which dozens of PACE members were invited. In parallel, Azerbaijani officials launched a smear campaign, claiming that Straesser was playing into the hands of Russia’s Gazprom by turning the West against Azerbaijan. Hakki Keskin, now working as a lobbyist for Azerbaijan, wrote an open letter to the Bundestag, accusing Straesser of being “extremely prejudiced,” Knaus writes.
He points that Azerbaijan blocked Straesser any way that it could, thrice denying him an entry visa. For the first time in PACE’s history, a member state refused to let a rapporteur into the country to do his job. This should have been a scandal, but there was no reaction from the PACE leadership, the secretary-general, or the Committee of Ministers. Straesser did not give up. He compiled a list of seventy alleged political prisoners and submitted it to the Azerbaijani authorities. He never received a reply. He invited Anar Mammadli, a respected Azerbaijani human-rights expert, to help work on the list for a few days in Berlin in May 2012. Two years later, Mammadli was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in Baku. He remains in jail today.
According to the article, in April 2011, a group of 35 PACE members asked for the promulgation of “objective criteria” to distinguish when someone is a political prisoner. In October 2012, some of the same members changed their minds and suggested that PACE did not even have the legal competence to discuss this issue. On 23 January 2013, in the most heavily attended debate in PACE history, Straesser’s resolution regarding political prisoners in Azerbaijan lost by a vote of 125 to 79. Following the vote, Straesser conceded defeat. He told journalists that the Council of Europe’s future as an institution that defends human rights was in doubt. The Azerbaijani delegation, meanwhile, was jubilant. Its head, Samad Seyidov, said flatly: “[T]he Council of Europe belongs to Azerbaijan.”
Aliyev regime unleashed a wave of repression across Azerbaijan. Youth activists, bloggers, and journalists found themselves tossed into jail on charges of drug and weapons possession, tax evasion, or “hooliganism.” Any human-rights defender who had a personal relationship to the Council of Europe became a special target. In arresting these activists, the regime was signaling a belief that it enjoyed impunity and would face no consequences for its actions. Particularly, Ilgar Mammadov, the coordinator of Council of Europe project to promote democracy in Baku, received a seven-year prison term on charges of having incited a riot. In December 2013, it was the turn of Anar Mammadli, chairman of the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Center, according to Knaus.
Human Rights Watch called his arrest “a blatant and cynical act of political revenge.” Mammadli, who had advised Straesser on the issue of political prisoners, was charged with illegal business activities and sentenced to more than five years in prison in May 2014, the article reads.
On 6 May 2014, Azerbaijani foreign minister Elmar Mammadyarov presented the priorities of the country’s Council of Europe chairmanship in Vienna. While foreign ministers from 47 Council of Europe member states were listening to him talk about his government’s support for “human rights, rule of law and democracy,” a court in Baku was sentencing eight young prodemocracy activists to jail terms of six to eight years each. Not one delegation in Vienna brought this up. Neither did the Council’s secretary-general, Thorbjørn Jagland, who also happened to be head of the Norwegian parliament’s Nobel Peace Prize committee, Knaus writes.
According to Knaus’s article, in June 2014, Ilham Aliyev returned to Strasbourg to lecture PACE on human rights as chairman of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. This was followed by another wave of repression. Many human-rights defenders had come together to produce a list of political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Within days, the main authors of this list—Leyla Yunus and Rasul Jafarov—were arrested.
It is further noted in the article that in September 2014, an independent commission acting on behalf of PACE awarded the Václav Havel Prize to the still-imprisoned Anar Mammadli. Neither the Committee of Ministers nor Secretary-General Jagland called for his release. Instead, in a November 2014 Guardian article, Jagland described Azerbaijan as a “young democracy” that “needs help.” In fact, during Azerbaijan’s Council of Europe chairmanship, the bank accounts of dozens of independent NGOs were frozen. The most respected local and international NGOs, such as IREX and the Open Society Foundation, faced criminal charges. Staffers went into hiding or exile. Some NGOs saw their offices sealed.
Related:
Newsfeed
Videos
Artur Vanetsyan: I think you'll see me more often at various events in future
