Washington event: Activists, rights defenders, urge international institutions to insure Azeri public benefit from oil-gas projects

Leading international environmental and human rights campaigners, as well as activists and politicians from Azerbaijan on Thursday urged global financial institutions to increase pressure on Azeri regime to ensure the public will benefit from projects that are financed with international public money, Turan's Washington correspondent reports.

The oil-rich post Soviet country with poor human rights records has recently

been suspended from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a global initiative promoting good practice in the oil and gas sector.

Yet it last month managed to renew a contract with international consortium to develop the country's biggest fields by a quarter of a century to 2050 in a move to unlock billions of dollars of fresh investments in the Caspian Sea deposits.

"This raises many questions about the autocratic regimes' ability to win funding from international funders despite committing endless human rights abuses back at home," said Human Rights Watch's Rachel Denber during a roundtable discussion on the impacts of the Southern Gas Corridor on corruption, human rights and sustainability in Azerbaijan.

The question is, she added, how international investments in this multi-billion mega project entrench corruption and human rights violations in Azerbaijan, impoverish local communities, and inhibit the timely transition to a renewable energy portfolio.

"Who is this project really benefiting?" she asked.

The event, organized by environmental and human rights organizations Crude Accountability and International Accountability Project, highlighted additional questions on how international financial institutions (IFIs) can promote good governance, participation, and sustainability when working in restrictive environments like Azerbaijan.

Among the panelists there were two speakers from Azerbaijan : Gubad Ibadoglu, EITI's borad member, and Tofig Yagublu, Musavat Party's deputy-chairman.

In his speech Ibadoglu mentioned that even a month after the signing of ACG extension project, the deal "hasn't been made public yet."

Speaking on domestic politics in Azerbaijan, Yagublu said, for years the country's civil society and human rights defenders have experienced constant and increasing pressure: Lack of fair elections, omnipresent corruption, large-scale human rights violations, have become emblematic of the problems. This however, hasn't prevented international oil firms, funders and western democracies from supporting the authoritarian regime.

Denber added that activists targeted by the Aliyev government included independent groups working to promote transparency of public revenues; they were denied access to finance.

The government froze numerous local and international NGOs" bank accounts and used legislative provisions adopted earlier to ban the groups from seeking and receiving funds from foreign donors.

For Crude Accountability's Sonia Zilberman, the tightening of the screws on civil society in Azerbaijan restricts civic monitoring of these lending operations.

"There is a lot of fear coming from the communities... What we had been able to document in Azerbaijan shows that local people have no idea that there is public international money from IFIs coming in; they do not even understand what IFIs are," she said.

Respondents that Crude Accountability interviewed in Azerbaijan "have said that nothing has improved since the Shahdeniz project has expended," she added.

A.Raufoglu

Washington, D.C.