Urgent debate on Azerbaijan included in PACE autumn session agenda

At the autumn session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 30 September - 4 October in Strasbourg, the deteriorating human rights situation in Azerbaijan will be discussed.

This issue is tentatively included in the agenda of the session on the first day of the session on 30 September under the wording: "Urgent procedure debate: ‘Deteriorating situation of human rights, rule of law and democracy in Azerbaijan’."  https://pace.coe.int/en/files/33709/html.

 If this agenda is approved, according to Council of Europe sources, substantive discussions will take place on Thursday 3 October.  As a result, recommendations to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on measures against Azerbaijan for failure to fulfill its obligations to the organization may be adopted.

It ought to be noted that the "Vaclav Havel Prize" will also be awarded at the session and one of the three candidates is imprisoned Azerbaijani activist Akif Gurbanov.

 A new round of relations escalation between Azerbaijan and the PACE came after Baku imposed an entry ban on the deputies who voted in favor of suspending the powers of the country's delegation in January this year.

President Ilham Aliyev, speaking at a conference in Italy a week ago, said that the ban could be lifted only after the powers of Azerbaijan's delegation to PACE were restored.

In this connection, the head of the Germany delegation to the PACE Frank Schwabe urged Baku not to try to ‘blackmail’ the Council of Europe, but to fulfill its obligations to the organization.