Discussion of the "Terter case" in PACE

Baku/06.11.21/Turan: The "Terter case" was the subject of discussions on November 5 at a meeting of the Committee on Legal Affairs of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

Erkin Gadirli, a member of the political council of the REAL Party, a member of the Azerbaijani parliament, wrote about this on his Facebook page.

In his speech at the meeting, based on reports from human rights organizations and reports from official structures, Gadirli noted that the "Terter case" has a special impact on political discussions in the country.

In his view, to assess the scale and nature of the issue, it is essential to organize a visit of the delegation of the Council of Europe Committee against Torture whose mandate is more effective mechanism than the appointment of a PACE special rapporteur on the issue.

Note that there were no persons willing to become a speaker during the discussions.

The Committee decided to continue the discussion in the future.

*In June this year, 24 PACE members made an initiative to investigate torture in Azerbaijan within the framework of the "Terter case" and to appoint a rapporteur of the Assembly for this objective.

An appropriate document under the number 1551 was published on June 25 on the PACE website. The initiator of the investigation was the Italian Senator Roberta Rampi.

The authors of the document linked the need for an investigation with large-scale torture facts in the "Terter case", the victims of which were more than 200 servicemen, 11 of whom died.

Even worse, twenty-five people were convicted of high treason on the basis of information obtained during interrogations under torture and sentenced to imprisonment from seven to twenty years.

**On May 7, 2017, the Prosecutor General's Office, the State Security Service, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan reported the detention of a group of military personnel and civilians for espionage in favor of the special services of Armenia.

The Prosecutor's Office opened a criminal case under Article 274 (high treason) of the Criminal Code.  The detainees were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. However, it soon became known that during the investigation at least 11 suspects were killed as a result of tortures. Later, the four killed were acquitted, and the investigators who fabricated charges against them were sentenced to various prison terms.-–03D06-