AZERTAC has interviewed chief of the department for work with law enforcement bodies of the Presidential administration of Azerbaijan Fuad Alasgarov.

Q: The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe viewed two reports on Azerbaijan- a report of the PACE Monitoring Committee and a report on political prisoners prepared by Christoph Strasser. The Assembly adopted the first report and rejected the second one. What has promoted such a result, in your mind?

A: I have to note that the co-rapporteurs of the Monitoring Committee and Rapporteur Strasser demonstrated different approaches to the implementation of their tasks. This difference in approaches, by the way, was obvious from their speeches at the PACE meeting yesterday.

Co-rapporteurs Agramunt and Debono Grech observed a line of dialogue with the state authorities of Azerbaijan and nongovernmental organizations, political parties, human rights activists and other civil society actors. Dialogue and cooperation are the essence of the Council of Europe, at least, declared.

The approach by the co-rapporteurs resulted in a fairly balanced report. Certainly, we did not agree with some of its provisions, so we submitted our comments to the Monitoring Committee while the delegation of the Milli Majlis to the PACE proposed a number of amendments to the draft resolution. But again, the whole document is quite balanced - along with criticism it reflects progress achieved in the monitoring period. The report particularly noted the progress in improving the legal framework, the judiciary and other areas, as well as the fight against corruption - one of the priority areas identified by the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.

The monitoring report also contains a section on the so-called "alleged political prisoners" and issues of humanitarian concern. Obviously, these issues fall under the competence of the Monitoring Committee, which monitors the implementation of obligations by the states. Therefore, the presence of a parallel document which had been considered in the monitoring report, raised eyebrows of many members of the Assembly, who stated that it is the first time that they encounter such cases in their practice.

As for Mr. Strasser, throughout his work as a rapporteur he has been keeping to a confrontational line, while showing a biased attitude towards Azerbaijan, incompetence and unwillingness to engage in dialogue. The natural result of this attitude was the presentation of an absurd `report` that does not stand any criticism. This document is perhaps the most notorious of all the other instruments adopted by the PACE over the past decade.

Q: What were other claims towards Strasser`s report?

A: First of all, this document was prepared and submitted to the appropriate committee of PACE before the Assembly approved the criteria relied upon by the report. That is, formally the necessary legal framework was absent at the time of its development.

Of course, the speaker was endowed with a dual mandate to prepare reports on the definition of the term "political prisoner" and observation of the situation with political prisoners. In this regard, it would be logical to expect that the rapporteur will first prepare a report after discussing the issue with all concerned parties, including the Azerbaijani authorities, and then prepare a second report based on this criteria. It is this approach that the Azerbaijani authorities were insisting on. However, the reporter did not accept our invitation to visit Azerbaijan to discuss possible criteria, as he was clearly not interested in preparing an objective report.

I have to say that the very criteria which Rapporteur Strasser "dragged through" to the PACE, are absurd. Once the votes "for" and "against" the amendment, which decided the fate of these criteria, were equal - 89 against 89. Speaking at yesterday`s meeting, one of the members of the Assembly said that he had gone out for coffee, and when he returned to the meeting room, the voting on the criteria had already finished. If he came back in time and voted against the amendment, as he wanted, these absurd criteria would have not been accepted. Even then, wise people in PACE had to conclude that there is actually a split in the Council of Europe on this matter. But ...

In addition, Strasser`s report does not specify the materials he based his work on. The rapporteur indicated in his report that he "received numerous comments, additional details, clarifications and other explanations on the different groups of cases from nongovernmental organizations". I suspect that he implied a couple or three local NGOs. It is also unclear what information he means. However, after comparing different parts of the report with the appropriate sentences, it became clear that this information was distorted in many cases. Of those whom the rapporteur included in his report, half were freed, some were not convicted, and some people were not found not only in pretrial detention facilities, but also in entire Azerbaijan, which means that these people do not exist.

Q: The report indicated that the work on it was carried by the same principles on which independent experts appointed by the Secretary General of the Council of Europe and previous rapporteurs of PACE once relied and also that this work is to a certain extent associated with the activity of the European Court of Human Rights.

A: This is an absolute lie. The experts appointed by Secretary General of the Council of Europe (and they were professional lawyers, two of them had been members of the European Commission on Human Rights) studied sentences and other materials of criminal cases and discussed them with the Azerbaijani side before the preparation of final reports. As I have already said what Rapporteur Strasser studied remains unclear, while his professionalism is out of the question.

Further, independent experts and previous rapporteurs did not consider the cases of persons who were not convicted at that time. Rapporteur Strasser included on his list a number of persons for who there are no sentences neither they are under arrest. For some of them, he invented a new term - "potential political prisoners." Apparently, the lack of professionalism and bias of the rapporteurs is fully compensated by the offset of his exuberant imagination.

As to the question of how the work of a rapporteur is associated with the European Court of Human Rights, the situation is just tragicomic. I want to give just one example.

The rapporteur considered that Farhad Aliyev is a political prisoner because of the "political shade" of the trial over the former minister along with an overly harsh sentence and treatment of “the elderly and seriously ill person” in prison.

Farhad Aliyev, who, by the way, is 49 years old, raised these issues in his complaint to the European Court. After considering the complaint, the court said, I quote, that they “can not come to the conclusion that the applicant`s condition was so bad, that he was treated inhumanely or insulted or that he was suffering from a serious disease that is incompatible with his detention, or that the provided medical care was so inadequate that caused him suffering, reaching the minimum level required under Article 3 of the Convention”.

I also want to refer to the decision of the European Court in the part concerning "the political shades" in Farhad Aliyev`s case. The European Court noted:

"The plaintiff complained that he was not immediately informed of the reasons for his arrest and the charges against him in line with paragraph 2 of article 5 of the Convention. He also complained under Articles 13 and 14 of the Convention and subject to other claims that he had no effective remedies to correct violations of his Conventional rights, and that he had been subjected to discriminatory treatment because of his political views.

However, in the light of the material submitted to it, and to the extent that the issue on appeal is in its jurisdiction, the court did not fix that these materials indicate any violation of the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Convention or its protocols. Therefore, this part of the claim is clearly unfounded and must be rejected in accordance with paragraphs 3 and 4 of Article 35 of the Convention".

The European Court reached a similar conclusion in the case of Rafiq Aliyev, whom Strasser has also included in his list.

Obviously, the reporter deliberately ignored the decisions of the European Court that did not meet his interests, probably in the hope that such a frame-up will not be noticed.

But the height of absurdity was the inclusion of the so-called "old cases” into the report. There are more than 20 similar cases. Ten years ago, these cases were viewed by independent experts. On the one hand, rapporteur Strasser agreed with the final conclusions of experts that these persons were not "political prisoners." All of them had been convicted for violent "non-political" crimes. Based on experts` opinion, these cases were closed many years ago.

However, the speaker included them into a "consolidated list of alleged political prisoners" and insisted that they must be released or their cases reviewed. In fact, this would lead to a revision of the conclusions of independent experts, which would make their work senseless.

Q: It is possible to conclude from the indicated factors that the rejection of Strasser`s report in PACE was practically inevitable.

A: We hoped that common sense would prevail during consideration of Strasser`s falsifications which he compiled in a form of a report.

It was absolutely clear that the author of the report sought by all means to submit the report on Azerbaijan in PACE. Moreover, he rather cared about the length of the document, not its contents. The haste and determination with which the speaker was trying to fulfill the political order was obvious.

There is no doubt that it was a political order. Despite the fact that the report was prepared by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, it has nothing to do with law and logics.

Christoph Strasser repeatedly demonstrated his partiality towards Azerbaijan. I have to remind his interviews and statements that are not compatible with being a rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

The political implications of the report are confirmed by the pressure that certain European circles, in particular Germany, have had on the members and leadership of the PACE in order to vote for the report. In fact, all of the work prepared by the Rapporteur and his report were an element of political pressure on our country. At the meeting held after the press conference, PACE Rapporteur called his failure "a black day for human rights and the Parliamentary Assembly”.

However, the adoption of a delusional document that does not have any value in terms of the Council of Europe activity to protect and promote human rights, would cause irreparable damage to the reputation of the organization and it would be really "a black day” for it. And the fact that the report was rejected by a margin of more than 40 votes shows that the majority of PACE members understand this.