“Even if Azerbaijan leaves the Council of Europe completely, almost no one in the country will feel it.”
elchi reports that President Ilham Aliyev stated this at the 4th Shusha Global Media Forum.
“Until September 2023, Azerbaijan had never faced any sanctions in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. It was precisely in September 2023, after we exercised our legitimate right to self-defense and cleared our territory of the remnants of separatists, that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe decided to punish Azerbaijan. In January 2024, the Assembly put the mandate of the Azerbaijani delegation to a vote and deprived the delegation of its voting rights.
This was supposedly about human rights issues. But if it were related to that, this step would probably have been taken earlier. This was simply a punishment for restoring our sovereignty,” the head of state said.
The President stated that after this, the Azerbaijani delegation made a very correct decision and suspended its participation in the Assembly’s meetings: “Because if we don’t have voting rights, what is the point of us being there? By the way, since that time, we have not participated in the election of judges to the European Court of Human Rights either.
That is precisely why Azerbaijan does not recognize the decisions of that court. Because we did not participate in the voting that determined who those judges are. For more than two years, we have been subjected to discrimination.
I can say openly that in the government, we have seriously discussed not only freezing our activities in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe but also leaving the Council of Europe altogether.
However, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Alain Berset, appealed to me, asking us not to do this and to create an opportunity to improve the situation. I postponed this decision for now. Unfortunately, there has been no progress since then.
On the contrary, completely unacceptable and ultimatum-like demands are being made against Azerbaijan by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. We were not the ones who spoiled the relations; they were.
They deprived us of our voting rights without any legal basis. Therefore, the step that must be taken is for the voting rights of the Azerbaijani delegation to be restored first. After that, our delegation will return to the Assembly. That is how it should be, not the other way around.
We have not taken any wrong steps against them. They are the ones who made an unfair decision. Therefore, they must take the step back and have the courage to admit that they made a big mistake.
I have expressed my thoughts on this matter many times. Even if Azerbaijan leaves the Council of Europe completely, almost no one in the country will feel it. In other words, our presence or absence there does not create any serious changes within the country.
Of course, instead of confrontation, it is better to have normal relations with these institutions. We are not looking for confrontation. Especially considering that not only the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe but also the European Parliament regularly makes baseless attacks against Azerbaijan.
I believe that this has already turned into a kind of obsession against Azerbaijan. Over the past five years, the European Parliament has adopted 13 resolutions against Azerbaijan. None of them matter to us and they do not affect anything in the country.
Nevertheless, of course, normal relations rather than confrontation with these bodies are more appropriate. But I emphasize once again that we did not create this situation.
Azerbaijan voluntarily joined the Council of Europe in 2001. At that time, neither this organization nor Europe in general was like it is now. We joined that Europe with certain hopes and expectations. We hoped that membership would help in the resolution of the Karabakh conflict and the restoration of our sovereignty.
We want the normalization of relations. But they must take the first step,” the head of state noted.