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Today, Europe has more human-rights treaties, employs more human rights commissioners, awards more human-rights prizes, and is home to more human-rights organizations than at any point in its history. And yet it was no great challenge for the autocratic regime of President Ilham Aliyev in Azerbaijan to paralyze this system, Gerald Knaus’s article in the Journal of Democracy reads.

By capturing the Council of Europe, the Azerbaijani government managed to neutralize the core strategy of the international human-rights movement: “naming and shaming.” Political prisoners and dissidents became “hooligans”; what is in fact a consolidating, unrepentant autocracy was now a “young democracy”; Azerbaijan’s stolen elections became “free and fair” and “competently organised.” With most prominent human-rights defenders in jail, Azerbaijan, as chair of the Council of Europe in 2014, hosted international conferences on “human rights education” and “tolerance.” While defying judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, Ilham Aliyev hosted the president of that very court at an October 2014 conference on the “Application of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms on national level and the role of national judges,” according to the article. 

Knaus highlights that while torture returned to jails in Azerbaijan, an Azerbaijani became the president of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture. All this poses a profound, even existential challenge to the human rights movement in Europe. For the Council of Europe, whose function is to defend the European Convention of Human Rights, to align itself with a regime jailing human-rights activists is unprecedented and deeply disturbing. 

As the article has it, the 53-year-old Ilham Aliyev, who rules his small country, feels completely at ease meeting European leaders. While in Brussels in January 2014, President Aliyev was asked by a journalist about political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Standing next to the secretary-general of NATO, the Azerbaijani leader responded in fluent English, as if explaining the obvious to a petulant child: “Azerbaijan is a member of the Council of Europe for more than 10 years. We are members of the European Court of Human Rights. And a priori, there cannot be political prisoners in our country.” 

Other dictators have to lie to their people about the respect that they enjoy abroad. Ilham Aliyev can tell the truth. The respect of fellow leaders makes it easy for him to ignore the critical reports published by international human-rights organizations. In August 2013, Amnesty International estimated that there were “at least 14 prisoners of conscience” in Azerbaijan. In September 2013, Human Rights Watch warned that the regime in Baku was “arresting and imprisoning dozens of political activists on bogus charges.” In mid-2014, a working group of Azerbaijani human-rights activists produced a detailed list of nearly a hundred Azerbaijanis jailed for political reasons. Then, before the English translation of the list was even on the Web, the list’s authors were themselves arrested. The silence from European governments and the Council of Europe was deafening, Knaus writes.

According to Knaus, there are two common explanations for this state of affairs. One explanation focuses on the money that Azerbaijan spends polishing its image: hosting mega-events in Baku; sponsoring the Spanish champion soccer team Atlético Madrid. The other explanation stresses Azerbaijan’s role as energy supplier. Both explanations fall short of appreciating the strategic genius of Ilham Aliyev’s campaign against human rights.

The author of the article further writes that many dictators hire lobbying and public-relations firms. No others have managed to combine arresting human-rights defenders with setting the agenda for the Council of Europe. Many dictators try to turn natural assets into political influence. Few have achieved this much with so little real leverage. Once pipelines currently under construction are completed, Azerbaijan might supply 2 percent of the EU’s natural gas. If a trans-Caspian pipeline to Turkmenistan is ever completed, something that looks highly unlikely today, this might rise to 4 percent.

The real secret to Azerbaijan’s influence is something else: The remarkable indifference of European democrats toward their own human rights institutions. In 2014, Azerbaijani human-rights activists won or were nominated for the most prestigious human-rights prizes awarded in Europe. One won the 2014 Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. Another Azerbaijani was nominated for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. Leyla Yunus, a leading Azerbaijani human-rights defender, was one of three finalists for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. She also won Poland’s 2014 Sergio Vieira de Mello Prize and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In November 2014, the Andrei Sakharov Freedom Award went to “political prisoners in Azerbaijan.” Such a flurry of awards is remarkable for a country of less than ten-million people.

More remarkable, however, is that the regime which put these activists in jail is simultaneously treated with respect by some of the same institutions that give out the prizes. In this respect, Ilham Aliyev has nothing to worry about. Human-rights activists may win their awards, but he remains a guest of honor in the capitals of Europe, Knaus stresses.