Expectations from the Council of Europe

In the hills of Khojavend on March 16th, officials from Azerbaijan’s presidential administration gathered for another meeting of the Coordination Headquarters overseeing the reconstruction of territories recaptured after decades of Armenian control. The session, chaired by Samir Nuriyev, head of the presidential administration, was one of many bureaucratic rituals underpinning one of the most ambitious state projects in the South Caucasus: the “Great Return” of displaced Azerbaijanis to Karabakh.

On March 12, a joint meeting of the Milli Majlis Committee on Legal Policy and State Building and the Committee on Human Rights discussed the addition of a new article — 523-1 “Engaging in Begging” — to the Code of Administrative Offenses. If adopted, begging would be removed from the category of vagrancy and classified as a separate administrative offense, with specific administrative sanctions applied.

On March 2, President Ilham Aliyev inspected a new fleet of municipal garbage trucks assembled at the Ganja Automobile Plant in the courtyard of the Baku Expo Center. Seventy vehicles, each with a capacity of 22 cubic meters and built on chassis supplied by the Minsk Automobile Plant (MAZ), will be distributed to 58 cities and districts across the country.

Azerbaijan’s human rights commissioner on Monday renewed a call for the international community to formally recognize the 1992 Khojaly killings as genocide, urging a legal assessment under international humanitarian and human rights law.