Yesterday, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) voted to not ratify the Azerbaijani delegation’s credentials, meaning they will not be able to participate in the body next year.
PACE meets quarterly and its mission is to uphold human rights and democracy in the region. Unlike Russia which was kicked out of the body in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan currently still has its membership, which was granted in 2001 alongside Armenia.
PACE has a sordid history when it comes to Azerbaijan – the organization has failed to criticize the country’s human rights abuses, detention of political prisoners, and rigged elections.
In a major turn around, the January 24, 2024 resolution against Azerbaijan’s delegation at PACE cited a number of disqualifying issues, including Azerbaijan’s inability to conduct free and fair elections, abuses in the judiciary, and other governance issues. It also noted Azerbaijan’s unwillingness to “acknowledge the very serious humanitarian and human rights consequences” stemming from the lack of free and safe access through the Lachin Corridor.” Finally, a number of examples of Azerbaijan’s “lack of co-operation” with the Assembly were detailed, such as its refusal to allow PACE monitoring rapporteurs to meet with persons detained on allegedly politically motivated charges, as well as perform a fact-finding mission in and around the Lachin Corridor.
So what does it all mean? What are the implications of this rejection and what has Azerbaijan’s reaction been? We break it down in this round-up of reactions on social media:
This is not a new issue for Azerbaijan, and it has long been criticized as an unworthy member. Social scientist Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative (ESI), which has focused on the human rights situation in Azerbaijan, says that action should have been taken years ago, but says that it didn’t happen due to Azerbaijan’s strategy of “caviar diplomacy.”
In fact, PACE and the European Parliament issued a joint statement on the 2013 Presidential Election that its observers found it to be “free, fair, and transparent”, an opinion which came under great criticism as not aligning with reality. For years, Azerbaijan was defended at international bodies such as PACE by politicians who had developed close ties to the Azerbaijani regime. An example was Pedro Agramunt, the former PACE rapporteur on political prisoners and then the President of PACE in 2016-7, who the ESI accused of covering up systematic violations of human rights in Azerbaijan. Sure enough, in 2017 when the Azerbaijani Laundromat money-laundering scheme was revealed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Agramunt was mentioned as a beneficiary. He was forced out of office later that year after a vote of no-confidence due to his participation in a Russian delegation’s trip to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
In addition, the tide was changing for Caviar Diplomacy, as it became exposed and various PACE representatives were charged with corruption, such as Italian politician Luca Volontè who had served as the chairman of its European People’s Party faction. He was charged with taking bribes from Azerbaijani politicians in 2016 and in January 2021 was sentenced to four years in jail. In all, 14 members of PACE were expelled for life including Volontè and Azerbaijani member Elkhan Suleymanov, who was referred to as the ring-leader of the bribery campaign within PACE.
It was already apparent that the measure would pass this time around, and that it would be a black eye for Azerbaijan on the world stage. For context, Belarus is widely considered a pariah state which has never been admitted to PACE. In 2010, PACE suspended its high-level contacts with Belarus’s government citing a “lack of progress” towards Council of Europe standards and a “lack of political will” in pursuing them.
The vote was welcomed by Zhala Bayramova, the daughter of Azerbaijani professor Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu, the most high-profile of the current political prisoners. Having held academic positions within US universities, his case has been highlighted by American officials and protests for his release have occurred all over Europe. Ibadoghlu was arrested during a visit to Azerbaijan after releasing a report which cast doubt on the much-celebrated EU-Azerbaijan gas deal, concluding that instead Azerbaijan may end up just reselling Europe the sanctioned Russian gas. In addition, he was investigating the money being spent on construction work in the Karabakh region, saying that “we know that it’s very likely that they are actually putting a big proportion of that money into their own pockets.” Ibadoghlu’s family alleges that he has been denied adequate food in prison and his condition is deteriorating.
Azerbaijan’s rhetoric going into the vote was that Europe is upset by Azerbaijan’s strength, as demonstrated by its victory over Armenia in taking Nagorno-Karabakh, and thus is trying to restrain it. Instead of facing a vote they knew they’d lose, the Azerbaijani delegation instead decided to walk out and suspend its participation with PACE.
Academic Bahruz Samadov also cites Azerbaijan’s newfound “victorious identity” as playing a major role in Azerbaijan’s spurning of international legitimacy. In a press release issued upon the delegation’s departure from PACE, it strongly chastised PACE, calling its resolution “a serious blow to the credibility and impartiality of the Council of Europe as a whole, and the responsibility for its grave and irreversible consequences will entirely lie with its initiators. Nobody in the world, including those sitting in this hall can speak with Azerbaijan in the language of threat and blackmailing.”
Azerbaijan’s rhetoric deflects criticism by claiming it comes from a place of “racism, Azerbaijanophobia” and Islamophobia”, which has grown to an “unbearable level” according to this Azerbaijani member of parliament. That is despite the fact that multiple other Muslim-majority nations are members of PACE: Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Turkey. The Islamophobia excuse was also deployed last month by Azerbaijani Ambassador to the United States Khazar Ibrahim to attack the US Commission on International Religious Freedom for adding it to the State Department’s list of Religious Freedom Offenders, citing “concerns for religious sites in Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing repression of Shi’a Muslim religious activists.”
Not just blaming PACE for its decision, Azerbaijani MP Nigar Arpadarai went so far as to threaten that this would be the beginning of the end for the Council of Europe by “shrinking its space”. Azerbaijan made no such statement against the Council of Europe’s much more momentous shrinkage in 2022 when it expelled Russia, a move Azerbaijan did not oppose.
The vote was preceded by debate on the resolution, mostly in favor of rejecting Azerbaijan’s credentials. Three of Azerbaijan’s representatives were scheduled to speak in its defense, however having already stormed out of the proceedings they were not there to deliver them. Thus the only two speeches on their behalf came from a representative of Azerbaijan’s closest ally Turkey, and one from Ukrainian Oleksiy Goncharenkonko representing the conservative faction. At the 1:30 mark in the video above, he questions the timing of the resolution, rhetorically asking “is it really [that] the situation got so [much] worse just now?” He appears to be taken aback when someone in the room shouts back “YES!”
And so it was. Out of the 90 representatives who took part in the vote (out of a total of 300, as there are 306 representatives in PACE but Azerbaijan’s 6 would not have been able to vote since the matter regarded themselves), 76 of them voted in favor of rejecting Azerbaijan’s credentials, 10 voted to uphold it, and 4 abstained, at least in some cases due to their status as appointed rapporteurs on Azerbaijan within PACE. An outsized number of Turkish representatives were included in the vote, a full one-tenth of the total, nine of whom voted in support of Azerbaijan. The lone Turkish dissenter was Berdan Öztürk, a member of parliament from the opposition pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The only other vote in favor of Azerbaijan came from Albanian Blerina Gjylameti, as Albania has been providing support to Azerbaijan on the international stage such as in the United Nations Security Council. Oddly, despite his vehement speech against the resolution, Goncharenkonko did not cast a vote.
Azerbaijan’s Twitter army was ready for the moment, as they were seemingly provided with various talking points ahead of time to copy/paste in unison. As of late, a network linked to officials from Aliyev’s ruling Yeni Azerbaijan Party has garnered attention for organizing such actions, such as one attacking the upcoming 2024 Summer Olympics in France. By the next day, many of the accounts involved had been flagged by Twitter as “temporarily restricted for unusual activity”.
The miniscule civil society space left in Azerbaijan is essentially a hostage in this situation and will be squeezed even further now.
As Gerald Knaus concluded, this vote was two decades in the making, delayed by bribery and corruption. As seen in the Ukrainian representative’s speech, this long delay in taking a stand created a situation in which that inaction could be used as justification to further ignore Azerbaijan’s abuses.
Even after the fall of the corrupted officials who enabled Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev within PACE, the prevailing strategy was it’s better to keep Azerbaijan on the inside as a deeply flawed member than the alternative. However, the breaking point has been reached. Yet at this point, whether Azerbaijan remains a member of PACE or not seems to be a small detail in the scheme of things. Aliyev took the international legitimacy he needed at the time from membership, and now that he has been sufficiently emboldened, he no longer needs it. There will likely be little difference now in the fate of the few remaining independent activists or the region as a whole whether or not Azerbaijan remains within PACE.
