AzVision.az republishes the article by newsperformance.

This is a response to the article by the Council of Europe (CoE) Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland titled ‘Azerbaijan’s human rights are on a knife edge. The UK must not walk away’. We respect Mr Jagland’s right to express his opinion on this matter in his article but we must strongly disagree with his criticism of Azerbaijan’s human rights and reject his statements which cannot be accepted.

We need to look at Azerbaijan in the geographical context to understand why in fact its human rights are making better progress and should not be criticised like Mr. Jagland has done. Azerbaijan is located between neighbouring Iran which has widespread human rights abuses including execution of offenders under the age of 18, restrictions on freedom of speech, restrictions on religion and gender equality and even stoning as a punishment for crimes. Azerbaijan also has Turkmenistan to its east whose human rights have been heavily criticised worldwide and include violation of political freedom, violation of freedom of expression including a ban on the internet (something Azerbaijan has never had) and restrictions to freedom of religion. Taking this into consideration, the Secretary General should know that Azerbaijan in comparison has a much better position on human rights. Azerbaijan even has a National Academy of Sciences which studies civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to implement it into the domestic system.

Mr Jagland has said in his article that “we have repeatedly warned Azerbaijan over its poor human rights record” but what he fails to understand is that Azerbaijan is striving to achieve its goals in developing its democracy and improving its human rights which is what the country and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev wants. Azerbaijan also continues to carry out reforms on its laws that do not comply with international law and continues to work with international organisations showing a relationship and communication between Azerbaijan and the international community.

Even Mr. Jagland has to admit that improvements are being made and mentioned in his article that there are “glimmers of hope”. Just three weeks ago President Aliyev released approximately 80 prisoners giving them pardon. Four of them were human rights defenders. This is not perfect but this is progress. He also mentions the establishment of a Joint Working Group on Human Rights Issues which is composed of human rights defenders, parliamentarians, officials of the presidential administration and a Council on Europe expert. The purpose of this group is to enable new discussion between civil society and the Azerbaijani authorities to potentially lead to the pardoning of more activists. It may be that the situation is not perfect with human rights but we should clearly encourage Azerbaijan to do more progressive changes instead of heavily criticising it while forgetting about its geography.

Azerbaijan has also been member of the Council of Europe since 2001 and has with the Council agreed an action plan to start projects to support the freedom of expression and independence of the judiciary.

Azerbaijan is young in its development and democracy and we cannot expect it to be in the position of a proper British democracy but we need to focus on the regional context before making negative judgement. So whist we respect the opinion of Mr. Jagland, we disagree with his argument. Meanwhile, we believe that more people criticising the government will be released in Azerbaijan, and we believe that the human rights situation will get better as clearly there is a strong will to transform Azerbaijan into a proper European democracy.

Unfortunately it is unclear from Mr. Jagland’s article if he is actually criticising Azerbaijan or if he is starting that there is a problem with the involvement of the European Court of Human Rights and Britain. Perhaps we should stop criticising and work together with Azerbaijan in improving its human rights situation.

Team of politics and law.

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