Baku / 06.06.18 / Turan: The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will appoint a rapporteur on political prisoners in Azerbaijan. The decision was made by the PACE Bureau.
As stated in the message published on the CE website, the rapporteur's appointment will take place at the PACE summer session in Strasbourg on June 25-29.
The candidacy will be determined at a meeting of the PACE Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights.
The initiative to prepare a report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan and the appointment of a rapporteur on this issue was made by 24 deputies led by the representative of the Netherlands, Pieter Omtzikht, two months ago.
Parliamentarians noted that in 2013 the report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan prepared by the German deputy Christoph Strasser was rejected.
Referring to the investigation of the facts of corruption in the PACE by the Independent Investigation Group set up by the Bureau of the Assembly, the authors of the initiative pointed out that in the failure of the Strasser report, a number of former and current deputies who are suspected of lobbying the interests of the Azerbaijani government played a significant role.
At the same time, the problem of political prisoners remains relevant in Azerbaijan, the authors of the initiative to appoint a rapporteur on this issue noted.
Recall that the report of the Independent Investigation Group pointed to the existence of thorough suspicions of bribery of a number of former and current PACE deputies in order to prevent the adoption of decisions criticizing the Azerbaijani authorities for human rights violations.
Based on these conclusions, the head of the Azerbaijani delegation, Samad Seyidov, was sanctioned in the form of restriction of his powers only by participation in the sessions of the assembly.
Two other figures of the corruption scandal, Elkhan Suleymanov and Muslim Mammadov, were withdrawn by the parliament of Azerbaijan from the delegation even before the report was made public.
Seyidov and the leadership of the Azerbaijani parliament called the report biased.
According to the lists of local human rights defenders, there are at least 140 political prisoners in Azerbaijan. -06B--
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