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Plans for a new Euro-Caspian pipeline, Mega Pipeline, will solidify the West's dependence on fossil fuels and authoritarian regimes, British journalist Emma Hughes writes for open Democracy.

This gas pipeline will extend over 3,500km, from the coastline of the Caspian Sea to the beaches of Puglia, Italy. Despite falling gas demand in Europe, this new pipeline is planned to be built at a cost of $45 billion.

Hughes writes that the Euro-Caspian Mega Pipeline will create a giant construction site across Europe. Trucks and excavators will rip up farmland, thousands of villages, forests, deserts and the seabed of the Adriatic. Moreover, the pipeline passes through one of the most active faults in Europe. In response, the community in Puglia have organised a tenacious campaign.

At the other end of the pipeline lies Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. “Last June, I attempted to visit Azerbaijan during the inaugural European Games held in the capital Baku. I was detained and put on a plane back to London, the first of several unwelcome guests — Amnesty International and the Guardian were also barred from entering the country,” Emma Hughes writes.

She notes that billions of dollars of oil money have been spent building new roads and glass skyscrapers in Baku. “Yet my companions soon discovered another side to Azerbaijan. Just a few kilometres from the centre of Baku, the six lane boulevards turn to dirt roads; the shiny 4x4 jeeps are replaced by Ladas and donkeys,” Hughes points out.

There are almost 87 political prisoners in Azerbaijan. They are journalists, bloggers, peace activists, human rights defenders and lawyers who have been arrested for speaking out against the corrupt regime of the President IlhamAliyev.One of them is the journalist Khadija Ismayilova. According to Hughes, her real crime was her journalism, which exposed the corruption reaching all the way to Azerbaijan’s ruling clan. She notes that Ismayilova is an outspoken critic of the Aliyev regime and BP, the biggest foreign investor in Azerbaijan since 1994. Today it is leading the consortium of oil companies involved in the Euro-Caspian Mega Pipeline.

The author highlights that, despite the deteriorating human rights situation, cooperation between BP and the Aliyevs has intensified over the years. The Aliyevs depend upon BP to maintain the flow of oil revenues to the state and the personal finances of the ruling clan. According to Hughes, the completion of the Euro-Caspian Mega Pipeline will make the Aliyev dynasty richer and more powerful.Meanwhile, the UK government is silent about problems with democracy in Azerbaijan.

The economic crisis following the falling oil prices would throw an ambitious and expensive project like the Euro-Caspian Mega Pipeline into doubt if European public money wasn’t being used to underwrite the pipeline, Hughes highlights.

Philippe Dam, Europe and Central Asia advocacy director with Human Rights Watch, writes for the EU Observer  that therecent Azerbaijan visit of the European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, could have been an important milestone for human rights in Azerbaijan if she had made clear that releasing everyone detained on politically motivated charges is a key EU condition for deeper political and economic ties.But her approach satisfied no one who cares about people’s rights.

Plummeting oil and gas prices have significantly hurt Azerbaijan, which previously had the world’s fastest growing economy thanks to its hydrocarbon wealth. In the current context, the country and its leadership obviously have a lot to gain from increased business relations with the EU, Dam writes.

“Azerbaijan’s other profound crisis concerns human rights.It’s not like president IlhamAliyev’s government had a clean human rights record before 2013, but in the last two years there have been systematic and relentless government efforts to crush independent voices,” the author notes.

The government has imprisoned human rights leaders, political critics, bloggers, and the like on politically motivated charges and stifled independent media. However, during her two-day visit to the capital, Baku, last week Mogherini only made a few vague public comments referring to rights, giving a strong impression that one of Europe’s harshest crackdowns on civil liberties is not an EU priority, Dam writes.

She had said the day before that differences will remain between the EU and Azerbaijan in some areas; however she also added that “If differences are normal, we must keep in mind that our shared interests exceed by far our differences.”Among those behind bars are RasulJafarov, a human rights campaigner; Khadija Ismayilova, a leading investigative journalist; IlgarMammadov, a prominent political analyst;TofiqYagublu, an opposition political leader; and others. Azerbaijan’s NGO laws are among the most restrictive in Europe and effectively block access to foreign funding allowing the government to excessively interfere with their work.

In December, the Council of Europe’s secretary general opened a rare inquiry into Azerbaijan’s failure to carry out the European Court of Human Rights’ rulings.In addition, the European Parliament adopted, last September, a resolution calling for the negotiations for a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Azerbaijan to “be immediately put on hold as long the government fails to take concrete steps in advancing respect for universal human rights.”

“Just three years ago, Azerbaijan’s disrespect for fundamental rights was still a good enough reason for the European Union to question the enhanced cooperation sought by Aliyev.But now the message he received from the EU could not be clearer: the politically motivated detentions of dozens of critics and rights activists and the government’s blatant disregard for freedom of expression and association are just ‘normal differences’,” Philippe Dam sums up.

Carnegie Europe writes that IlhamAliyev has waged an unremitting campaign against independent journalists and independent nongovernmental organisations. Scores of activists are behind bars. “Many say the crackdown in Azerbaijan is related to the government’s fear of another Maidan,” saidthe representative on freedom of the media of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), DunjaMijatović, as cited by Carnegie Europe.