Azerbaijan and the Council of Europe
AZERBAIJAN is not really a democracy according to Freedom House, a watchdog. Since the early 1990s, it says, elections have been deeply flawed. Parliament is rubber-stamping the government’s decisions. Corruption is widespread.
In theory only democratic countries can join the Council of Europe (CoE), which promotes human rights. Yet Azerbaijan has been a member since 2001.
Back then, council members hoped that membership would accelerate Azerbaijan’s democratic transition. That has not happened. Indeed, political manipulation of elections may have increased over the past decade: in a blistering report published last year, the European Stability Initiative, a think-tank, called Azerbaijan’s 2010 parliamentary elections the most flawed ever in the CoE’s member states.
Who cares? After all, democracy is in poor health in several other member countries, such as Russia. The CoE is one of the continent’s more obscure bodies: politicians who appear in its Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) carry little clout at home. Moreover, Azerbaijan’s international significance lies in its energy resources and strategic location. Over the past decade, western diplomats have been quick to pull their punches over thorny human rights issues.
Yet this is not merely a story of western indifference. Since joining the council, the ESI argues, Azerbaijan has used “caviar diplomacy”, including gifts, free trips and money, to create a group of apologists within PACE who consistently act in its interests and render the assembly impotent. This should matter to anyone concerned about the resilience and credibility of western institutions, the ESI says.
Following the deeply flawed 2005 parliamentary elections, some council members argued that PACE should suspend the Azerbaijani delegation’s voting rights. (It had done the same with Russia in April 2000 over concerns about Chechnya.) The majority in the assembly disagreed, and issued a strongly critical statement instead. Five years later, it couldn’t even manage that: despite widespread violations in the 2010 parliamentary elections, PACE election monitors found far more positives in that year’s parliamentary elections than observers from the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).
Is PACE’s adoption of a recent monitoring report on implementation of Azerbaijan’s commitments to the council, written by Pedro Agramunt and Joseph Debono Grech, a step in the right direction? The authors do at least record Azerbaijan’s main democratic shortcomings. Yet ESI calls Mr Agramunt a long-standing “defender of the Aliyev regime”. His report, it says, misleadingly notes “positive steps” taken by Azerbaijan that either took place before the reporting period began or were largely inconsequential. Serious problems, though mentioned, are underplayed. The result, ESI claims, is “an impressive sleight of hand” and “deeply dishonest”.
By far the most divisive issue is political prisoners. In December 2009, PACE asked Christoph Straesser, a German member, to define the term officially. The definition he presented in October 2012 was one that the Council had used since 2001. Several delegates then argued that PACE did not have the authority to assess such human rights violations; that belonged to the European Court of Human Rights. Their attempt to block the definition was defeated by the narrowest of margins. It followed lobbying by Azerbaijan that one delegate described as “unmatched in its brazenness”.
Worse was to come. Despite being refused a visa to visit Azerbaijan three times, Mr Straesser wrote a monitoring report on the situation of political prisoners in Azerbaijan, which PACE debated on January 23rd. Arguments were polarised: some delegates called Azerbaijan’s refusal to let Mr Straesser visit unacceptable; others claimed his report therefore lacked credibility. Several members highlighted a “prisoner carousel”, in which people are arrested, released and re-arrested. Indeed, shortly after the co-rapporteurs published their report in December, a presidential amnesty led to the release of 13 out of the 14 prisoners mentioned, leading Mr Agramunt to downplay the problem during the debate. Yet three days after PACE rejected Mr Straesser’s report, the courts in Baku sentenced five more demonstrators to prison.
Some progress has been made. For a start, in adopting the report by Mr Agramunt and Mr Grech, the PACE resolution referred to the “systemic detention of people who may be considered prisoners of conscience”. Moreover, while a record number of people voted against Mr Straesser’s report, many others voted for it. A growing number of people are worried by Azerbaijan’s antics.
According to Amnesty International, the government is cracking down on dissent in the run up to presidential elections in October this year. In February, it locked up Illgar Mammadov, a presidential candidate, for “organising” apparently spontaneous riots in the town of Ismayili in January. Last week, the authorities jailed an independent journalist for nine years. Azerbaijan is due to assume the chairmanship of the council’s Committee of Ministers in May 2014. The Council of Europe’s credibility is on the line.