 | Crisis between Azerbaijan, CE deepening |
Azerbaijan asserting its positions By Azernews Staff
The relations between Azerbaijan and the Council of Europe have plunged into deep crisis incited by the outstanding issue of release of the convicts that are claimed by European lawyers as political prisoners.
The situation got even worse after the Paris meeting of the PA CE Committee on Human Rights and Legal Issues demanded that Azerbaijan immediately free all the political inmates it has. The Azeri delegation walked out in protest to the decision.
The PA CE bureau has recently discussed the issues to be included in the agenda of the PA CE winter plenary session on January 24. The question is if the issue of political prisoners in Azerbaijan will be involved in the agenda. News reports suggest that the discussions in the bureau were ‘very strenuous’. Azerbaijan was demanded to unconditionally release alleged political prisoners.
PA CE experts’ list passed to the CE general secretary Walter Schwimmer name 17 most urgent political prisoners.
The list entails former defense minister Rahim Gaziyev, ex-interior minister Isgandar Hamidov and Alikram Humbatov, a government official charged with high treason.
The discussions in the bureau have yielded no palpable results and the PA CE bureau is now expected to continue the consideration of the issue on January 21.
The Azeri delegation is doing its utmost to prevent the issue from getting into the agenda of the PA CE winter session.
In a move to defuse the tension, the Azeri government has stated that the Prosecutor General of Azerbaijan has addressed the Appeals Court to re-try the three.
Meanwhile, foreign minister Vilayat Guliyev paid a short working visit to Strasbourg to meet with the CE secretary general Walter Schwimmer and other CE officials. Upon the completion of the visit, he admitted that Azerbaijan is being pressured by the CE", voicing hope that the dispute won't go so far to lead to sanctions on Azerbaijan.
"Walter Schwimmer acknowledged that the issue should be given a special attention and the negative stance of separate members of the PA CE is not necessarily a CE position towards Azerbaijan”, according to the minister.
Vilayat Guliyev believes that Azerbaijan can take “decisive steps” if the CE demands do damage to the country's independence.
+Background
The official Baku and the CE have been arguing over the existence of political prisoners throughout Azerbaijan's membership in the Council.
Commenting on the tension, deputy foreign minister Araz Azimov said that the row around alleged political prisoners is a forced problem. The lack of common criteria in international practice for defining the term 'political prisoner' is paving the way for political speculation. "This is what is actually happening to Azerbaijan", he said.
Yet, the Azeri public holds presumptions that the tabling of this issue in the CE institutions is tied to the Armenian lobby.
Most of the Azeri public don’t regard two of the inmates, Rahim Gaziyev and Alikram Humbatov, who was convicted of high treason, as political prisoners.
It should be also noted that the list of the political prisoners the CE has presented to the Azeri delegation includes convicts that were jailed for committing felonies. Besides, it is still unclear how the inmates unknown to most of the Azeri public and absent from the lists of local human rights activists have listed as political prisoners by the CE.
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Issue No.N-2 (236), 2002
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