Baku, May 11, AZERTAC

The Hague-based Commonspace.eu portal has published an article by Vasif Huseynov, the head of the department at the Center of Analysis of International Relations (AIR Center) of Azerbaijan, headlined "Europe speaks to Azerbaijan with different voices."

The article reads: “The spring of 2026 has produced one of the strangest split-screen moments in EU foreign policy. On 30 April, the European Parliament adopted yet another resolution sharply critical of Azerbaijan, embedded inside a text on “supporting democratic resilience in Armenia.” Within forty-eight hours, the Milli Majlis of Azerbaijan suspended cooperation with the European Parliament across all areas, withdrew from the EU–Azerbaijan Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, and initiated procedures to leave the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly. By President Ilham Aliyev’s count, this is the fourteenth such resolution adopted against Azerbaijan since May 2021 — a record he described as “a kind of obsession.”

And yet, in the same weeks, an entirely different European policy was unfolding in Baku. On 11 March, European Council President António Costa visited Azerbaijan, calling it “a partner of strategic importance to the EU” and announcing work on a new framework agreement that would broaden cooperation beyond energy into security, defence, digital, and transport. On 21–23 April, Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs paid an official visit, signing fresh cooperation documents and reaffirming the Latvia–Azerbaijan strategic partnership. From 26 to 28 April, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš chose Azerbaijan as his first destination outside the EU during his current term, leaving Gabala with the contours of a deal under which the Czech Republic plans to import roughly 2 billion cubic metres of Azerbaijani gas a year. On 25 April, in his first wartime visit to the South Caucasus, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed in Gabala and signed six bilateral agreements, before publicly proposing Azerbaijan as a venue for trilateral talks with Russia and the United States. And on 4 May, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — the first Italian premier to visit Baku in thirteen years — described Azerbaijani gas and oil as “decisive for the energy security” of Italy and announced “permanent political coordination” between the two governments. The next day, EU High Representative Kaja Kallas arrived in Baku to advance what she called “a more structured partnership,” noting that Azerbaijan is “a valued and reliable energy partner” and that connectivity between the EU, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia is “in our shared strategic interest.”

Against this background, what exactly is the European Parliament doing? Its 30 April resolution called for the “right of return” of Karabakh Armenians, demanded the “immediate and unconditional release” of convicted war criminals and used the Soviet-era term “Nagorno-Karabakh” — an administrative entity formally abolished by Azerbaijani law in November 1991. Each of these formulations reaches into matters that fall squarely within Azerbaijan’s sovereign jurisdiction, and each has been rejected by Baku as interference in its internal affairs. None of them is calibrated to support the peace process initialled in Washington in August 2025 between President Aliyev and PM Pashinyan. On the contrary, by reopening conflict-era vocabulary at precisely the moment when the South Caucasus is finally moving past it, the resolution risks supplying ammunition to those forces in Yerevan and elsewhere that are working hardest to derail the agreement.

What makes this drift so striking is that it is not the policy of the European Union as a whole. It is the policy of one of its institutions — and arguably its least credible one. Three years after Qatargate, Transparency International concluded in December 2025 that “far too little has changed” inside the European Parliament, with MEPs “continuing to block meaningful reform” of ethics, oversight, and foreign-interference rules. Subsequent allegations that Huawei-linked lobbyists distributed cash, smartphones, and football tickets to up to fifteen current and former MEPs in exchange for political positions, and reports that some groups systematically misappropriated EU funds, have only deepened the credibility deficit. Calls for serious institutional reform have grown louder precisely because the Parliament’s output has so often appeared disconnected from both citizens’ priorities and the Union’s strategic interests. When an institution that cannot reliably police its own integrity issues moralising verdicts on a third country whose energy keeps Europe warm, the reputational damage runs in the opposite direction from what its drafters intend.

This is the awkward truth that Roberta Metsola’s defiant line at the Yerevan summit — “we will never change the way we work, even if it is uncomfortable” — does not address. The discomfort is not Azerbaijan’s. The European Commission, the European Council, and an ever-longer list of member-state capitals have already concluded that engagement with Baku is a strategic necessity. They are signing framework agreements, expanding pipelines, and asking Aliyev to host trilateral diplomacy on Ukraine. The European Parliament, meanwhile, is producing texts that read as if none of this were happening.

The parallel with Section 907 of the United States Freedom Support Act of 1992 is instructive. When pressed on the Parliament's legitimacy to issue such verdicts, President Metsola has invoked the institution's democratic mandate: the European Parliament, she has noted, is a democratically elected body, and its resolutions reflect the will of its members. This is formally true — but democratic election has never been a guarantee of sound judgment on foreign policy. The United States Congress is equally a democratically elected body, yet in 1992 it adopted the Section 907 amendment and imposed sweeping sanctions on Azerbaijan at the precise moment when Azerbaijan was the victim: its internationally recognised territories were under military occupation, its population was being driven from their homes, and its civilians were being massacred — most notoriously in Khojaly, where hundreds of ethnic Azerbaijanis were killed in February of that year. Democratic election, in other words, did not prevent the United States Congress from adopting a policy that rewarded aggression and punished its victim. Nor does the European Parliament's democratic mandate lend it consistent moral authority when its record on other conflicts is examined.

Azerbaijan has made its choice plain: it will deepen its partnership with the European Union and increase its contribution to European energy security, while declining to treat the European Parliament as a legitimate interlocutor for as long as that body keeps mistaking selectivity for principle. That is not a rupture with Europe. It is a recognition that two Europes are now operating in the South Caucasus — one led by Costa, von der Leyen, Kallas, Meloni, Babiš and Rinkēvičs, the other by a Strasbourg chamber. The longer the Parliament insists that its resolutions are uncomfortable truths rather than self-inflicted wounds, the more pressing becomes a question that increasingly belongs to Europeans themselves: whose interests, exactly, is its South Caucasus policy serving?”