The “European Stability Initiative” published the second part of the study on Azerbaijan entitled “Caviar Diplomacy: European Swamp”, which describes blatant facts of corruption schemes organized by Azerbaijani authorities involving high-ranking European politicians.
It is said that in recent years, the leaders of Azerbaijan, a small autocracy in the Caucasus, have shown how easy it is to undermine core human rights standards and bend a formerly proud institution to its will. They have done so in close cooperation with Russia, and with the active support of elected politicians from across Europe, including from some of its oldest democracies. Azerbaijan’s actions have been met with almost complete silence from national parliaments, governments and political parties.
In 2012 ESI published “Caviar Diplomacy – How Azerbaijan silenced the Council of Europe” to sound an alarm. The official reaction was disappointing. The report was covered by international media and the term “caviar diplomacy” began to be widely used. Some concerned officials in the Council of Europe reached out to us to confirm that things were, indeed, as bad as we had described them. But there things stopped. The reaction of Azerbaijani officials was neither alarm nor outrage, but amused indifference.
At the time, Azerbaijan’s lobbyists were busy preparing for their biggest coup – to combine Baku’s chairmanship of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers in 2014 with the imprisonment of their most prominent domestic critics. Caviar diplomacy went into overdrive. Expensive carpets worth thousands of euros were given away as gifts; so many that one Azerbaijani embassy had its own room for them. Luxury Vertu smart phones, handmade in the UK, were presented to supporters. Expensive watches and jewellery, silver sets and MacBooks were handed over to politicians, officials, even secretaries. Business contracts and paid holidays were part of the benefits, as were prostitutes. And then there was money: large sums, given in cash or transferred via anonymous companies. And while the campaign was in full swing, Azerbaijani politicians attacked anyone who drew attention to their activities.
For as long as the only cost of corruption in the Council of Europe was the institution’s failure to speak out about the imprisonment of Azerbaijani journalists, dissidents and youth activists, most leaders of European governments felt that it was not a matter of deep concern. “Of course, Azerbaijan is corrupt”, we were told, when urging a stronger reaction; and “Yes, the Council of Europe is useless.” Others would add: “But what did you expect?” Caviar, bribes, a dynastic family in Baku: it all seemed just an exotic story about a small and distant country capturing an institution without real power. Yet the failure in Strasbourg to hold the line on core European values has now come to haunt European politics. Its consequences can be seen in the growing confidence of autocrats, the increasing ruthlessness of their methods and the widespread retreat of liberal politics. The ease with which democratic institutions and safeguards can be undermined has emerged as a fundamental threat to European democracy.
When ESI published “Caviar Diplomacy” on 24 May 2012, there was one city in Europe where the report was read with particular interest: Strasbourg, the seat of the Council of Europe. President of PACE Luca Volonte only one month before the ESI report was published, had travelled on a private trip to Baku to negotiate with the regime what services he could offer. On 10 April 2012, he arrived in Baku to meet with Elkhan Suleymanov, a fellow member of PACE, and with Muslum Mammadov, Suleymanov’s collaborator and “envelope carrier”, as one Azerbaijani described his role at the time (Mammadov became a full member of PACE in January 2016). In Baku, Volonte presented his ideas how to boost Azerbaijan’s image in advance of its presidency of the Council’s Committee of Ministers in May 2014.
His cosy relationship with the regime began during an earlier trip in July 2011. Upon his return, Volonte sent an effusive note to Suleymanov: “Dear Elkhan, Thank you for everything!!! Thanks to you I have discovered a very interesting country, our friendship is certainly growing!! Thanks, your gifts are very tasty and very precious!!!”
In general, Luca Volonte at various times received about 3 million euros from Azerbaijan for “his dirty lobbying services.” The report emphasizes that the money received by Luca Volunte was also used to bribe several deputies from other European countries who voted against resolutions and CE reports condemning human rights violations in Azerbaijan. Traces also lead to Pedro Agramunt, Chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
Volonte knew that Pedro Agramunt was a crucial player. Few PACE members had travelled to Azerbaijan as often as Agramunt, who went there as PACE election observer in 2003, 2005, 2010 and 2013 and consistently defended Baku’s human rights record.
Volonte cooperated with other European politicians to lobby the interests of Azerbaijan. Among them, the authors of the report mention Italian EPP member Luigi Vitali, Tadeusz Iwinski, a former Polish communist and member of PACE since 1992, who had travelled to Azerbaijan many times and had presented to PACE an implausibly positive report on the 2010 parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan in January 2011, Robert Walter, a British Conservative from North Dorset and leader of the European Conservative Group (then the European Democrats Group or EDG) in PACE, Jordi Xucla, a Spanish MP who later became chairperson of the ALDE group, and who repeatedly voted with Azerbaijan, as well as British politician Michael Hancock, who always praised “the development of democracy in Azerbaijan”.
It is recalled that when in 2013 the German member of the Council of Europe, Christophe Strasser, presented a report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan, Pedro Agramunt came out strongly against Strasser, arguing that there simply was no problem with political prisoners in Azerbaijan. In the end, the report was rejected during the voting.
So, after that, the Azerbaijani authorities intensified repressions against dissidents and political activists and began to arrest them on far-fetched charges and sentence to long terms of imprisonment. The most known is the leader of the opposition “Republican Alternative” movement Ilgar Mammadov, head of the Center for Monitoring Elections and Democracy (CMWOD) Anar Mammadli and journalist Khadija Ismayilova.
Summing up, the authors of the report note that in 2017 systematic violations of human rights in Azerbaijan should be on the agenda in PACE, and all cases of corruption and bribery involving European parliamentarians should be investigated in detail.
It is recalled that in 2012, the European Stability Initiative published the first part of the study entitled “Caviar diplomacy: How Azerbaijan silenced the Council of Europe”, which details the chronology and mechanisms for bribing the deputies of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe by the ruling regime of Azerbaijan.
In the study, particularly, it was said that the distribution of generous gifts is part of the Azerbaijani traditions, as well as the expectation that the magnanimity will be repaid one day. This is the logic of the policy, which Azerbaijani officials in private conversations call “caviar diplomacy”.