Council of Europe urged to investigate Azerbaijan bribery allegations

YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 3, ARMENPRESS. Pieter Omtzigt, a Dutch parliamentarian at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), is urging PACE leaders to launch a “deep, thorough investigation by an independent panel” that makes its findings public, on the recent violation and corruption allegations within the structure. The lawmaker’s proposal namely refers to discussions which emerged after a PACE voting about Azerbaijani political prisoners in 2013, The Guardian reports.

“We see a lot of suspicious outcomes of votes and procedures on Azerbaijan,” Omtzigt told the Guardian,calling for an urgent investigation and overhaul of the assembly’s code of conduct.

Azerbaijan joined PACE in 2001, but observers have long raised questions about the parliamentary assembly’s weak response to ballot-box stuffing and human rights violations in the oil-rich country.

Human rights groups have blamed “caviar diplomacy”, gifts of gold, silver, silk carpets and the regional fishy delicacy, which are showered on visiting dignitaries to the Azerbaijani capital, Baku.

When it became known that Italian parliamentarian Luca Volonte accepted bribes from Azerbaijan to carry out pro-Azerbaijani activities in PACE, many senior parliamentarians have warned that failure to carry out an independent investigation would erode the credibility of the human rights body. “It is not credible if you tell other countries to be open and transparent if you do not investigate credible allegations of vote-rigging,” Omtzigt said.

One fifth of Pace’s 324 parliamentarians have signed Omtzigt’sresolution, which states that “recent, serious and credible allegations of grave misconduct” risk undermining public confidence in the assembly. The signatories are a cross-party coalition, drawn from 25 countries, including the UK, France, Germany, the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries, Greece and Ukraine.

Gerald Knaus, the chairman of the European Stability Initiative, a thinktank specialising in south-eastern Europe and the Caucasus, said the Council of Europe’s parliamentary leaders had failed to ask questions about “open and obvious” suspicions of corruption, which had been circulating in the corridors of the Strasbourg assembly.

The rosy picture of Azerbaijan’s elections painted by monitors from Pace should have raised questions years ago, Knaus said.

“We have had election observers [in Azerbaijan] from the Council of Europe in 2010, 2013 and again in 2015. Each time these elected parliamentarians came away saying the sun was shining, when everyone else said it was raining. Each time they say the elections were free and fair … and each timethe long-term observer election experts from the OSCE and ODIHR, say there were major problems.”

Knaus said the assembly’s leaders had shown an “astonishing amount of indifference”. The Council of Europe “is an institution we need more than ever given all the attacks on core human rights in Europe,” he continued. “If Europe fails to defend these principles what hope is there for anywhere else in the world.”

The head of PACE, Spanish senator Pedro Agramunt, initially resisted the inquiry, blaming fellow parliamentarians for “a campaign to discredit political opponents by means of slurs, intimidation and coercion”.

But Agramunt made an abrupt U-turn in favour of an investigation on Friday, after strongly-worded complaints from a dozen countries, including Switzerland, Belgium, the Baltic and Nordic states.

Knaus said the key question now was the terms of reference of the investigation, which will be presented to Agramunt in early March.