Council of Europe Archives

Yerevan’s 2800th anniversary celebrated in Council of Europe

November 8, 2018 By administrator

Armenia’s Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe Paruyr Hovhannisyan and President of the CoE Congress of Local and Regional Authorities Anders Knape on November 7 opened the exhibition dedicated to Yerevan’s 2800th anniversary on the sidelines of the Congress session at the CoE headquarters, the Armenian foreign ministry told Armenpress.

During the event Paruyr Hovhannisyan delivered remarks, stating: “It’s impossible not to love Yerevan, its unique atmosphere and the people who created it, its evenings of classical music and jazz, in the complete harmony with the contemporary buildings constructed with modern Armenian architecture heritage solutions. And our today’s exhibition is one of the manifestations of that love towards Yerevan”. Summing up his remarks, Hovhannisyan expressed support to the CoE Congress reforms and stated that it should serve an example for the CoE remaining bodies.

In his remarks Anders Knape said although Yerevan celebrates 2800th anniversary, it’s a young and vibrant city. He stated that they followed the recent velvet revolution in Armenia with a great interest and plan to develop the close cooperation with Armenia.

The opening of the exhibition was followed by an official reception.

The event has been organized by Armenia’s permanent representation to the CoE, the ministry of territorial administration and development and Armenia’s delegation to the CoE Congress of Local and Regional Authorities. It was attended by Ambassadors to the CoE, diplomats, CoE secretariat officials, as well as members of the Congress.

Council Of Europe Warns Azerbaijan To Free Opposition Leader Or Face Legal Action

October 27, 2017 By administrator

Ilqar Mammadov

The Council of Europe has notified Azerbaijan that it will take unprecedented legal steps against Baku unless it releases imprisoned political leader Ilqar Mammadov by November 29.

Mammadov, an opposition politician and rights activist who heads Azerbaijan’s Republican movement, was arrested in February 2013 and charged with helping organize riots. Western governments and rights groups have decried the charges as politically motivated.

Mammadov was sentenced to seven years in prison in March 2014. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in May 2014 that his imprisonment was a violation of his rights and was intended to silence or punish him for criticizing the government.

The Council of Europe said Mammadov was the only such political prisoner who has not been released after winning such a ruling from the European rights court. Council of Europe members are obliged to implement the court’s judgments.

Azerbaijan’s noncompliance has prompted the council’s Committee of Ministers to launch what it said was the first-ever process for referring the case back to the court to decide whether the continued detention of Mammadov represents a further rights violation.

The committee on October 25 gave Baku until November 29 to either release Mammadov or it will discuss sending the case back to the rights court for a second ruling.

Azerbaijan to be expelled from the Council of Europe?

September 26, 2017 By administrator

Azerbaijan’s not carrying out the decisions by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) may lead to its expulsion from the Council of Europe (CoE), wrote Kommersant newspaper of Russia.

According to the paper, the CoE Committee of Ministers is for the first time preparing a petition to submit to the ECtHR Grand Chamber, since the Azerbaijani authorities refuse to carry out the ECtHR decisions, and the procedure was launched against Azerbaijan.

Kommersant recalled that if a country violates Article 46 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, it may be expelled from the CoE.

Azerbaijani authorities refuse to release opposition activist Ilgar Mammadov, despite the ECtHR decision that his detention was unlawful and politically motivated.

Council of Europe: Urgent measures needed to restore freedom of expression in Turkey

February 15, 2017 By administrator

The space for democratic debate in Turkey has shrunk alarmingly following increased judicial harassment of large strata of society, says Memorandum on freedom of expression and media freedom in Turkey.

The Memorandum has been published by Nils Muižnieks, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights based on the findings of two visits to the country that he conducted in April and September 2016.

“This deterioration came about in a very difficult context, but neither the attempted coup, nor other terrorist threats faced by Turkey can justify measures that infringe media freedom and disavow the rule of law to such an extent. The authorities should urgently change course by overhauling criminal legislation and practice, re-develop judicial independence and reaffirm their commitment to protect free speech” said Nils Muižnieks.

The Commissioner regrets that tangible progress concerning media freedom and freedom of expression which was painstakingly achieved by Turkey in co-operation with the Council of Europe, was halted and reversed in recent years, leading to an already alarming situation at the time of the Commissioner’s visit in April 2016.

“In particular, the overly wide application of the concepts of terrorist propaganda and support for a terrorist organisation, including to statements and persons that clearly do not incite violence, and its combination with an overuse of defamation, has put Turkey on a very dangerous path. Legitimate dissent and criticism of government policy is vilified and repressed, thus shrinking the scope of democratic public debate and polarising society.” This situation has significantly worsened under the on-going state of emergency which confers almost limitless discretionary powers to the Turkish executive to apply sweeping measures, including against the media and NGOs, without any evidentiary requirement, in the absence of judicial decisions and on the basis of vague criteria of alleged “connection” to a terrorist organization.

Media pluralism and independence, in particular, have been casualties of these developments characterised notably by the use of state resources to favour pro-governmental media, pervasive internet censorship, arbitrary exclusion of media and journalists, takeover or closure of media outlets critical to the authorities, violence and reprisals against media workers and the incarceration of over 150 journalists.

The Commissioner also underscores that this deterioration goes hand-in-hand with the erosion of the independence and impartiality of the Turkish judiciary. “While this problem affects the whole judiciary, it is in particular the role of the criminal judges of peace that is the most concerning, because these formations have transformed into an instrument of judicial harassment to stifle opposition and legitimate criticism and are now at the origin of some of the most obvious violations of the right to freedom of expression.”

The Commissioner urges the Turkish political leaders in the strongest possible terms to change course and to display the responsibility and tolerance expected in a democratic society. They must redevelop the political will necessary to tackle the very long-standing systemic issues suppressing freedom of expression, including on the Internet, and finally execute the numerous judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, some of which date decades back.

“A first step is to lift the current state of emergency and reverse the numerous unacceptable infringements of freedom of expression, and in particular media freedom and academic freedom, that it engendered. In addition, the Turkish authorities must completely overhaul the Criminal Code and the Anti-Terrorism Law so as to align law and practice with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. Beyond these deficiencies, it is crucial to change a judicial culture where judges and prosecutors interpret and apply laws in a way that consistently undermines freedom of expression and media freedom in Turkey.”

Council of Europe urged to investigate Azerbaijan bribery allegations

February 2, 2017 By administrator

A woman sits by a sculpture of a snail near the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan. Photograph: Jamie Squire/Getty Images for BEGOC

(Theguardian) Parliamentary assembly accused of turning blind eye to corruption after claims that ex-member was paid €2.4m to rig election,

One of Europe’s most venerable human rights bodies has been warned it risks falling into irrelevance unless it sets up a robust investigation into allegations of vote-rigging in favour of Azerbaijan’s authoritarian regime.

The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe (Pace) has been accused of turning a blind eye to corruption, after allegations that a former senior member was paid €2.39m (£2.06m) to engineer votes to protect the kleptocratic regime of Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev.

Pieter Omtzigt, a centre-right Dutch parliamentarian, is urging Pace leaders to launch a “deep, thorough investigation by an independent panel” that makes its findings public.

“We see a lot of suspicious outcomes of votes and procedures on Azerbaijan,” Omtzigt told the Guardian. The Dutch Christian Democrat is the co-author of a resolution calling for an urgent investigation and overhaul of the assembly’s code of conduct.

The Council of Europe, which was created in 1949 to protect democracy and promote the rule of law, has 47 members including Russia and Turkey. Azerbaijan joined in 2001, but observers have long raised questions about the parliamentary assembly’s weak response to ballot-box stuffing and human rights violations in the oil-rich country.

Human rights groups have blamed “caviar diplomacy”, gifts of gold, silver, silk carpets and the regional fishy delicacy, which are showered on visiting dignitaries to the capital, Baku.

The latest allegations are centred on Italian politician Luca Volontè, the former chair of the centre-right group in the parliamentary assembly. He is being investigated by the Milan public prosecutor’s office for allegedly accepting €2.39m in bribes, in exchange for working for Azerbaijan in the parliamentary assembly. Human rights groups allege he played a key role in orchestrating the defeat of a highly critical report on the abuse of political prisoners in Azerbaijan in 2013. Volontè denies any wrongdoing.

The allegations, which were aired by Italian public broadcaster RAI in November 2016, have plunged the parliamentary body into turmoil.

Many senior parliamentarians have warned that failure to carry out an independent investigation would erode the credibility of the human rights body, which was inspired by Winston Churchill, and sends election monitors to every corner of Europe. “It is not credible if you tell other countries to be open and transparent if you do not investigate credible allegations of vote-rigging,” Omtzigt said.

One fifth of Pace’s 324 parliamentarians have signed Omtzigt’s resolution, which states that “recent, serious and credible allegations of grave misconduct” risk undermining public confidence in the assembly. The signatories are a cross-party coalition, drawn from 25 countries, including the UK, France, Germany, the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries, Greece and Ukraine.

Mogens Jensen, a Danish politician who leads the socialists in the parliamentary assembly, has also warned that the body’s credibility is at stake. The allegations were a “great threat to the assembly’s reputation and reliability” he told parliamentarians last week, adding his voice to a chorus of calls for action.

Gerald Knaus, the chairman of the European Stability Initiative, a thinktank specialising in south-eastern Europe and the Caucasus, said the Council of Europe’s parliamentary leaders had failed to ask questions about “open and obvious” suspicions of corruption, which had been circulating in the corridors of the Strasbourg assembly.

The rosy picture of Azerbaijan’s elections painted by monitors from Pace should have raised questions years ago, Knaus said.

“We have had election observers from the Council of Europe in 2010, 2013 and again in 2015. Each time these elected parliamentarians came away saying the sun was shining, when everyone else said it was raining. Each time they say the elections were free and fair … and each time the long-term observer election experts from the OSCE and ODIHR, say there were major problems.”

Knaus said the assembly’s leaders had shown an “astonishing amount of indifference”. The Council of Europe “is an institution we need more than ever given all the attacks on core human rights in Europe,” he continued. “If Europe fails to defend these principles what hope is there for anywhere else in the world.”

The head of Pace, Spanish centre-right senator Pedro Agramunt, last week agreed to set up an independent investigation to “shed light on hidden practices that favour corruption”. He had initially resisted the inquiry, blaming fellow parliamentarians for “a campaign to discredit political opponents by means of slurs, intimidation and coercion”.

But Agramunt made an abrupt U-turn in favour of an investigation on Friday, after strongly-worded complaints from a dozen countries, including Switzerland, Belgium, the Baltic and Nordic states.

Knaus said the key question now was the terms of reference of the investigation, which will be presented to Agramunt in early March. “There is no reason to be confident about the caviar coalition,” he said, referring to perceived Azeri government interest groups in the parliamentary assembly. But he voiced hope that MPs could help ensure a credible inquiry.

The Pace president was not immediately available for comment.

The parliamentary assembly leader also faces pressure from the secretary general of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland, who has said there can be “zero tolerance on corruption” when asked about the allegations by Transparency International.

Jagland’s spokesman said the secretary general had raised concerns internally within the Council of Europe, but could not confirm whether he had spoken to Agramunt. The spokesman added: “He has deemed and still deems this a matter for the parliamentary assembly.”

Under Jagland, the Council of Europe launched an investigation into Azerbaijan’s compliance with the European convention on human rights in 2015, the first such inquiry into a member country in more than a quarter of a century.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/feb/01/council-of-europe-urged-investigate-azerbaijan-bribery-allegations?CMP=share_btn_tw

The Council of Europe ends its cooperation with Baku on Human Rights

October 8, 2015 By administrator

Strasbourg, 7 October 2015 (AFP) -The Council of Europe said Wednesday it was ending its cooperation on human rights with Azerbaijan because of the “deterioration” of the situation of fundamental rights in this country.

The Secretary General of the pan-European organization, Thorbjørn Jagland, informed the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe of its decision to withdraw from the joint working group on human rights set up in order to improve dialogue with Baku in the subject, he said in a statement.

This working group is composed of 18 activists of human rights, members of parliament and government, and representatives of the Council of Europe. The meetings were very episodic.

A representative of the Council of Europe are participating since October 2014 “to revive the dialogue between civil society and the authorities. Despite this initiative, the general situation of human rights activists has deteriorated, “the organization said in a statement.

“More and more human rights activists have recently been imprisoned, and the Council of Europe has received disturbing reports about unacceptable prison conditions,” according to the same statement. Among the members of this working group included including investigative journalist and activist Azerbaijani anti-corruption Khadija Ismailova, recently sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.

During September, a young opposition journalist Shirin Abbasov, was arrested for “resisting the police”. In August, a couple of activists for human rights, Leyla and Arif Yunus, has been sentenced to long prison terms in a case denounced by NGOs as orchestrated by the government.

President Ilham Aliev, 53, denies any accusation of breach of human rights, and his government denounced the criticism as a smear campaign against the country, a member since 2001 of the Council of Europe.

Turkey Council of Europe urges immediate access to Cizre by independent observers

September 11, 2015 By administrator

Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Nils Muižnieks has urged Turkish authorities to allow independent observers to enter Cizre, amid growing concerns of serious human rights violations.

“Thus far, the information provided by the authorities does not allay all concerns. I urge the authorities to ensure immediate access to Cizre by independent observers, including by Turkey’s national human rights structures, in order to dispel the rumors of human rights violations perpetrated by security forces. I hope for a quick end to this emergency situation,” Muižnieks said in a written statement Sept. 11.

The curfew declared in Cizre, a city of 100,000 inhabitants in the southeastern province of Şirnak, has entered into its eighth day, with reports on continuing clashes between security forces and militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Interior Minister Selami Altınok has said that 30-32 terrorists have been killed in clashes, while there are claims of a loss of around 20 civilians so far.

The commissioner highlighted his concern for Cizre, amid his increasing alarm regarding the recent increase in violence around the country.

“I have received reports that public life, including essential services such as healthcare, and means of communication have been severely disrupted as a result [of the curfew], and that entry and exit from the city have been barred. More disturbingly, I have also received serious allegations of disproportionate use of force by security forces against civilians,” he said.

He also said he did not question the Turkish authorities’ right to carry out anti-terror operations “in a particularly difficult and violent context.” However, he added, “the proportionality and legality of such operations must always be very carefully scrutinized by the authorities and by courts, including in the light of relevant international human rights standards.” He reiterated his deep concern for the current situation, as “an exceptionally severe interference with the human rights of a very large population and a near-complete information blackout.”

Azerbaijan Council Of Europe Commissioner Slams Baku For Human Rights Violations

September 8, 2014 By administrator

By RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service

September 08, 2014

The Council of Europe’s human rights chief has harshly criticized Azerbaijani authorities over what he says is the deterioration of human rights and basic freedoms in the oil-producing Caspian Sea country.

The council’s human rights commissioner, Nils Muiznieks, told RFE/RL on September 8 that a “wave of arrests of human rights defenders” had increased in recent months.

He said the sitation was “totally unacceptable” and “flies in the face of the human rights obligations undertaken by Azerbaijan” when it joined the 47-nation European human rights body.

In an e-mail interview, Muiznieks cited several cases in which Azerbaijani journalists and bloggers critical of the authorities have been jailed, persecuted, or humiliated.

“The few critical voices that are still outside the country’s detention facilities face mounting pressure and often had to leave the country, when not under a travel ban, and had their bank accounts frozen,” Muiznieks added.

Tensions between the Council of Europe and Azerbaijan

May 23, 2014 By administrator

Strasbourg, May 22, 2014 (AFP) – New tensions emerged between the Council of Europe and Azerbaijan on Thursday, after the cancellation of a visa issued to a French Socialist MP René Rouquet.

Azerbaijan yet exercised since mid-May the rotating presidency for six months, the executive body of the European organization uniting 47 countries, the “Committee of Ministers” Foreign Affairs.

“Following the decision of the official Baku to cancel at the last minute visa issued” Mr. Rouquet, member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), thus preventing him from attending PACE meetings scheduled for Thursday and Friday in Baku, the Bureau of the Assembly decided retaliation.

“The Assembly committees not hold meetings in Azerbaijan from 1 June for a period of two years,” except for election observation missions, according to a statement. Mr. Rouquet is Vice President of PACE, and president of the French delegation to the meeting, which has 318 parliamentarians from member countries.

The PACE Bureau invoked the “violation of the General Agreement and the Paris Protocol on the Privileges and Immunities of the Council of Europe, which enshrines the dual principle of irresponsibility and parliamentary inviolability and that of free movement “of its members.

States of the Council of Europe must respect “their commitments regarding freedom of movement of members of the Assembly on official mission, particularly with regard to visas,” he has said.

The measure “may be waived if the authorities (Baku) guarantee freedom of movement of members of PACE in Azerbaijan when traveling on behalf of the Assembly,” he has said.

Also Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights, judicial arm of the Council of Europe, ruled that Azerbaijan had violated the fundamental rights to have wanted to silence the opponent Ilgar Mammadov, was recently sentenced to seven years prison.

Visit to Baku, the Secretary General of the pan-European organization, Thorbjorn Jagland, called for the release of Mr. Mammadov. The Council of Europe was established in 1949 and joined in the 1990s by almost all the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, is responsible for the promotion of human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

Azerbaijan, one of the last countries to have joined in 2001, is regularly criticized for violations of these principles.

Jagland had already said “worried” last week reports that two French journalists following the official visit of President François Hollande in this country had their equipment confiscated before being deported.