It's time for investigations

A close friend to the Azerbaijani government , and the main pillar of support for this criminal-corrupt regime in PACE, Pedro Aqramunt, fled the Parliamentary Assembly’s spring session hearing on 24th April. The MPs demand an explanation for Argamunt’s independent visit to Syria and meeting with President Assad- a person who has committed a genocide against his own nation, and who like Ilham Aliyev in Azerbaijan, inherited the Presidency from his father. In fact, long before this incident, Aqramunt should have been stopped and interrogated for his dirty dealings with the Azerbaijani government. His Syria scandal however, preceded this.

Aqramunt served the Azerbaijani government - just like Luca Valenta. In spite of being a member a European organisation tasked with a leading role in protection of human rights, Aqramunt used his platform to become a main defender of this corrupt and criminal regime. Unlike Valenta however, Aqramunt had an additional role- that of a rapporteur on Azerbaijan. At the time, I have met him to discuss the issue of political prisoners. As a co-rapporteur with the parliamentarian Grech (who is from Malta, a country that Azerbaijan has implicated in its corruption ) Aqramunt, was acting more like an advocate for Aliyev regime, than a representative of a Council of Europe- an organization with a specific mandate to deal with the issues of human rights. In opposing the report on political prisoners presented by Christoph Strasser, he put even a greater effort than Luca Valenta. His efforts in defence of Aliyev regime become apparent, if one looks at his attitudes towards the reports on the Azerbaijani political prisoners, on elections, democratic reforms and human rights. His speeches, during PACE sessions and committee hearings are a sufficient evidence of this very clear pro-Aliyev advocacy.

At this point, it is worth mentioning that as a chairman of PACE , Aqramunt used all means available to him to prevent the committee level investigation of Luca Valenta’s acceptance of a bribe from the Azerbaijani government. One may very well infer that in all likelihood, Aqramunt himself is implicated in this bribery scandal. I met Aqramunt at the time when he was a co-rapporteur on Azerbaijan. I did personally make it very clear to him, that he was a more passionate advocate of a corrupt Aliyev regime, rather than the defenseleess political prisoners. Since on issues of human rights and political prisoners, Aqramunt openly and consistenly sided with the Aliyev regime, the political party leaders and leading human rights organizations rightly decided to abstain from meeting him and his co-rapporteur Grech.

The leading voice on the issues of human rights , the most professional and experienced human rights defender Leyla Yunus openly criticized Aqramunt, and accused him in-person of selling his political loyalty to the Aliyev regime. Leyla Yunus, also made it clear, that Aqramunt carried a fair share of blame in allowing Azerbaijan to slide into such tragic circumstances. Leyla Yunus, as it now turns out, was absolutely right. Mr Aqramunt did everything within his powers to ‘argue ‘ that there were no political prisoners in Azerbaijan. By intentionally preventing the adoption of Christoph Strasser’s report on political prisoners, individuals like Valenta, Aqramunt, and all those MPs who voted down the report, granted a carte blanche to Ilham Aliyev. With their disgraceful and inhumane conduct, these members of PACE provided a cover for Aliyev to further crack down on civil society, harass political opposition and to definitively crush the democratic institutions. Since 2013, Aliyev used this fiasco to argue widely and publicly , wherever he went, that there were no political prisoners in Azerbaijan, and that even PACE confirmed this.

There is a seperate and additional need to discuss the political conduct of PACE members who were represented in the observation mission. Even in this area, Pedro Aqramunt did his best to serve the Azerbaijani government. With few limited yet notable exceptions- principled representatives Qross and Herkel, the PACE lost all its stature and credibility in the eyes of ordinary Azerbaijanis ,when their parliamentarians supported the fraudulent elections in Azerbaijan. Strangely enough, those PACE parliamentarians who were democratically elected in their native countries, somehow found rigged Azerbaijani elections as notable examples of democracy. In 2010, and right after the parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan, Dick Marti who was previously a committee chair in PACE , openly said that the Azerbaijani lobbyists offered him a bribe of a considerable sum in exchange for a positive review of the parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan. He also added that he refused this, but expressed a grave doubt on whether all other PACE members shared his attitude, and whether they too rejected the bribe.

In 2013 , and after presidential elections in Azerbaijan, for the first time in the European history PACE election observers did not join the official findings of the OSCE Democratic Institutions and Human Rights bureau- an organisation with official observation mandate . This is because the OSCE observation mission , an organization with an official mandate viewed presidential elections as littered with irregularities , and in its official report made it explicit that instances of electoral fraud were observed in 58% of the polling stations. This raises a legitimate and pressing question: why did the PACE mission disagree with the OSCE - an organization that had more sophisticated, more professional , more far-reaching and long-term observation office? Why for the first time in the European history , PACE observers came to different findings of Azerbaijani presidential elections than the OSCE mission? Because, with negligible exceptions the majority of both members and the leadership of the PACE election observation mission, had dirty dealings with the corrupt Azerbaijani government. This is exactly the right time , to investigate all of these pressing issues.