ESI Report
Berlin
17 December 2016
Human rights for sale
Can basic international norms be undermined by corruption? Can international politics be fundamentally reshaped by the personal greed of politicians? These are among the most important questions in global politics today. When it comes to the Council of Europe, guardian of the European Convention of Human Rights and, since its creation in 1949, the leading intergovernmental human rights institution in the world, the answer to both questions is yes.
In recent years, the leaders of Azerbaijan, a small autocracy in the Caucasus, have shown how easy it is to undermine core human rights standards and bend a formerly proud institution to its will. They have done so in close cooperation with Russia, and with the active support of elected politicians from across Europe, including from some of its oldest democracies. In the process, they filled a rolodex with names of politicians across the continent who have something to hide and can be blackmailed in the future. Nobody should have illusions that these methods are
restricted to the Council of Europe. Nobody should assume that it is only Azerbaijan that is exploiting the greed of politicians. And it is not only the massive corruption that should worry us.
Azerbaijan’s actions have been met with almost complete silence from national parliaments, governments and political parties. Human rights NGOs often feel that corruption of human rights institutions is not their primary concern. Serious media struggle to tell a gripping story about the internal politics of international institutions. In fact, it should not be hard: what we witness in Europe today is a methodical assault on human rights and the institutions set up to
protect them – an epic struggle of values and a steady erosion of basic norms. It is a story, however, that still waits to be told, and the effort to take back captured institutions is still waiting for politicians to lead it.
In 2012 ESI published “Caviar Diplomacy – How Azerbaijan silenced the Council of Europe” to sound an alarm. The official reaction was disappointing. The report was covered by international media and the term “caviar diplomacy” began to be widely used. Some concerned officials in the Council of Europe reached out to us to confirm that things were, indeed, as bad as we had described them. But there things stopped. The reaction of Azerbaijani officials was
neither alarm nor outrage, but amused indifference. “Some of us laughed”, one senior diplomat told ESI later: “There was a feeling at the time that we can buy anything.” Seeing their illicit efforts described without consequence only added to their sense of impunity.
At the time, Azerbaijan’s lobbyists were busy preparing for their biggest coup – to combine Baku’s chairmanship of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers in 2014 with the imprisonment of their most prominent domestic critics. Caviar diplomacy went into overdrive. Expensive carpets worth thousands of euros were given away as gifts; so many that one Azerbaijani embassy had its own room for them.1 Luxury Vertu smart phones, handmade in the UK, were presented to supporters. Expensive watches and jewellery, silver sets and MacBooks were handed over to politicians, officials, even secretaries. Business contracts and paid holidays were part of the benefits, as were prostitutes.2 And then there was money: large sums, given in cash or transferred via anonymous companies. And while the campaign was in full swing,
Azerbaijani politicians attacked anyone who drew attention to their activities. In October 2012, the regime’s chief lobbyist in Europe, Elkhan Suleymanov, a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), wrote an open letter to the Council of Europe’s Secretary General, Thorbjorn Jagland, and to members of PACE, complaining that Jagland had referred indirectly to the ESI report in a press conference. As Suleymanov put it:
“The Secretary General of the Council of Europe used some regretful [he probably meant regrettable] expressions when answering the question of a journalist during a press conference organized by him on October 4th, including ‘Azerbaijani caviar is a threat to the independence of PACE’, ‘If it is true that the members of the Azerbaijani Delegation to PACE bribed their colleagues with black caviar, then it is absolutely unacceptable.’”
Suleymanov feigned outrage:
“I think putting forward such superficial and baseless accusations against Azerbaijan is unacceptable, and the utterance of these perceptions against any member state by the Secretary General of the Council of Europe is regrettable. It further compounds doubts about his neutrality as the highest authority of the Council of Europe … Why does the European Stability Initiative always come to the agenda at the last moment … with seemingly the only goal to discredit Azerbaijan as a member state, without any ground or
proof, right before a vote?
For as long as the only cost of corruption in the Council of Europe was the institution’s failure to speak out about the imprisonment of Azerbaijani journalists, dissidents and youth activists, most leaders of European governments felt that it was not a matter of deep concern. “Of course, Azerbaijan is corrupt”, we were told, when urging a stronger reaction; and “Yes, the Council of Europe is useless.” Others would add: “But what did you expect?” Caviar, bribes, a dynastic family in Baku: it all seemed just an exotic story about a small and distant country capturing an institution without real power. Yet the failure in Strasbourg to hold the line on core European values has now come to haunt European politics. Its consequences can be seen in the growing confidence of autocrats, the increasing ruthlessness of their methods and the widespread retreat of liberal politics. The ease with which democratic institutions and safeguards can be undermined has emerged as a fundamental threat to European democracy. In this follow-up to Caviar Diplomacy,4 we take a closer look, four years later, at the progress that has been made on miring the Council of Europe in a swamp of corruption. This time we provide the names of members of the parliamentary assembly who paid bribes – including Elkhan Suleymanov, the mastermind behind this policy in Strasbourg. We describe in detail
how the corruption of MPs proceeded, from early visits with precious gifts meant to test thebeneficiaries’ reactions, to long-term contracts involving huge sums of money.5 In the third part in this series we will offer specific recommendations for what to do next.
Life in the swamp
When ESI published “Caviar Diplomacy” on 24 May 2012, there was one city in Europe where the report was read with particular interest: Strasbourg, the seat of the Council of Europe. It described a reality familiar to many working there, something that began in 2001, the year Azerbaijan joined the organisation, and that gathered pace after Ilham Aliyev, who had been a vice-president of PACE, became president of Azerbaijan in 2003. Once the Baku-Tbilisi-
Ceyhan oil pipeline was completed in 2005 and Azerbaijan’s state coffers were awash in oil revenues, caviar diplomacy shifted into top gear.
As Azerbaijani sources told ESI at the time, Baku had developed a strategy of ensuring its influence:
“Many deputies are regularly invited to Azerbaijan and generously paid. In a normal year, at least 30 to 40 would be invited, some of them repeatedly. People are invited to conferences, events, sometimes for summer vacations. These are real vacations and there are many expensive gifts. Gifts are mostly expensive silk carpets, gold and silver items,
drinks, caviar and money.”
On 25 May 2012, one day after ESI published its report, Denise O’Hara, Secretary of the European People’s Party (EPP) group in PACE, wrote an email to the group’s president, Italian Christian Democrat Luca Volonte. She expressed her alarm that “this Azeri lobby is getting out of hand.” Volonte wrote back to say that he had read the report, and was “surprised and saddened.” And yet, he stressed, there was no proof of corruption. He added that Russian gas interests or the Armenian lobby might have been behind the report. How could anybody seriously believe that Azerbaijan had set out to silence criticism in PACE?
In fact, Volonte was not surprised at all. Only one month before the ESI report was published, he had travelled on a private trip to Baku to negotiate with the regime what services he could offer. On 10 April 2012, he arrived in Baku to meet with Elkhan Suleymanov, a fellow member of PACE, and with Muslum Mammadov, Suleymanov’s collaborator and “envelope carrier”, as one Azerbaijani described his role at the time (Mammadov became a full member of PACE
in January 2016). In Baku, Volonte presented his ideas how to boost Azerbaijan’s image in advance of its presidency of the Council’s Committee of Ministers in May 2014.
This was not Volonte’s first trip to Baku. His cosy relationship with the regime began during an earlier trip in July 2011. Upon his return, Volonte sent an effusive note to Suleymanov: “Dear Elkhan, Thank you for everything!!! Thanks to you I have discovered a very interesting country, our friendship is certainly growing!! Thanks, your gifts are very tasty
and very precious!!!”
Volonte was an experienced politician with many contacts. He was born in 1966 in Saronno, a small town in Lombardy close to Milan, which is known for its bitter-sweet almond-flavoured liqueur, amaretto. As a young man, he joined an influential Italian Catholic lay movement, the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation.7 He entered the Italian parliament in 1996 as a representative of a small Christian Democratic party supportive of Silvio Berlusconi’s
government. Between 2011 and 2013, he was one of Italy’s full-time representatives in PACE, where he also led the EPP group, the largest group in the assembly. He remained an Italian parliamentarian until 2013.
In August 2012, Volonte offered Elkhan Suleymanov help with his contacts in the Vatican. It did not go well. The Heydar Aliyev Foundation, led by Azerbaijan’s first lady, already had many contacts in Rome, and had concluded an agreement in 2012 to fund the restoration of the catacombs of Saint Marcellinus and Saint Peter.8 At the opening of an exhibition on Azerbaijani culture on 14 November 2012, speakers praised the close contacts between Azerbaijan and the
Vatican. 9 Volonte, who attended the opening, felt unappreciated. In the evening of 14 November, he sent an email to Suleymanov, complaining about the behavior of senior Azerbaijani officials who “did not even greet me. I looked like a fool in front of [Archbishop Salvatore Rino] Fisichella … I do not understand the reason for this pointless humiliation …
There will be consequences for these official and political actions … They don’t consider me as a friend.”
On 20 November, Suleymanov wrote back. Addressing Volonte as his “dearest friend”, he
noted:
“I am really saddened by these news … I beg you to accept my apologies for all this. I understand very well that words alone cannot compensate for this offence. I have developed all relationships according to your proposal and efforts. I ensure you that I will inform the leadership and I will let you know as soon as possible. Your devoted friend Elkhan.”
On 21 November, Volonte composed two documents with instructions for Muslum Mammadov, which police later found in his office. One included bank details of Volonte’s personal foundation – called Novae Terrae (New Lands) – and a demand for €100,000. It also referred to a monthly stipend of €30,000 for Volonte to be paid half in cash “in €50 and €100 banknotes” and half through transfers to a bank account of the company LGV. A second document referred to €250,000 to be transferred to LGV, registered in Milan under the name of Volonte’s wife. A few weeks earlier, Volonte had urged his accountant to set up this company (with his initials, Luca Giuseppe Volonte) as quickly as possible for the purpose of receiving money from Baku.
On 14 December 2012, the first transfer of €100,000 was made to the bank account of Novae Terrae Foundation, where it arrived three days later. On Christmas Eve 2012, another transfer of €220,000 was made to the bank account of LGV. The money came from two companies – Metastar Invest, registered in Birmingham, and Jetfield Network Limited, registered on the Marshall Islands, a chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean – and reached Italy via two banks in Estonia and Latvia. The purpose of the first transfer was described as “Fir consultinq Service” (sic). This path was chosen to conceal the fact that these were payments from one PACE member (Elkhan Sulyemanov) to another (Luca Volonte).
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