Authorities do not pay compensation ordered by the European Court

Baku / 28.02.18 / Turan: The authorities of Azerbaijan like to repeat that they fully comply with the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. They talk about this at every mention of the violation of human rights in the country.

Often, the execution of decisions means payment by the state of compensation to plaintiffs whose rights have been violated, and who were not finding justice in their country, had to apply to the European Court.

The number of such plaintiffs, and, accordingly, complaints is growing every year. According to the data for January of this year, Azerbaijan is among the seven countries that are most often complained to the European Court, and 4% of all complaints received by the Strasbourg Court fall on the share of our country.

Last year, the number of appeals from Azerbaijan was 679. This is almost twice as much as in 2016.

In October last year, when the question arose of excluding the country from the Council of Europe for failure to comply with the decision on the leader of the REAL movement, Ilgar Mammadov.

Nevertheless, Speaker of the Milli Mejlis Oktay Asadov has a face to assert that, unlike some countries, Azerbaijan executes all decisions, pays fines.

However, the authorities used to pay compensation to the victims at least according to the decisions of the European Court, but in recent years they stopped doing it.

Most civil society activists, representatives of opposition parties, in whose favor the European Court delivered a large number of decisions, can not receive compensation due to them.

"The decision on our cases came in the fall of 2016, the state had to pay compensation to us within six months. Payment began much later - in June last year. The most interesting thing is that we were not paid the whole amount, but in small parts until August. Then payments stopped, and not renewed until now," said a man who asked not to be named.

According to the lawyer Asabali Mustafayev, who won dozens of cases in the European Court, he also does not know the reason for the suspension of payment of compensation.

"The reasons are not explained. We assumed that this is due to the adoption of the budget for the current year; and the budget has long been adopted and approved, but there are no payments. We write to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, they appeal to the authorities, and they are silent. However, the other day 17 plaintiffs were compensated for real estate cases. However, there are no payments for administrative arrests and violations during the elections," Mustafayev said. -0--