Foreign

Home page

Foreign

Joint Working Group for Implementation of International Human Rights Standards expresses opinion on Amnesty Internationalâ€™s report regarding Azerbaijan

09 December 2011 12:19 (UTC +04:00)

It was noted that the critical remarks in the report are not true, they are biased.

According to the opinion, within the period of independence, legislative base was created in Azerbaijan in the field of democratic state-building, human rights and fundamental freedoms, democratic institutions, including civil society institutions were formed. There are a number of political parties and media outlets in the country. Cases of violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms are observed sometimes. Human rights are mainly violated by the junior officials, judges, ordinary policemen. One of the major reasons is that the democratic way of thinking of such officials has not been formed, the other reason is that these officialsâ€™ democratic management practice is weak and they understand the modern legal norms in narrow sense.

Moreover, there are cases of corruption in the country, this delays the extension of the democratic processes. Despite the serious anti-corruption campaign in the country, such cases are still observed.
â€œWe consider that the Azerbaijani government should increase efforts to eliminate the negative cases influencing the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms, extension of democratic processes, strengthening of civil society institutions. Moreover, enhancement of the cooperation between Azerbaijan and the international organizations having large experience in the abovementioned spheres, specialized exercises and trainings will give an impetus to the development of the processes.â€

According to the opinion, all layers of society, including the representatives of the opposition and authorities are equally concerned over the inactivity of the international community towards the restoration of hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanisâ€™ rights violated as a result of Armeniaâ€™s military aggression against Azerbaijan, occupation of 20 percent of the Azerbaijani territories, ethnic cleansing policy carried out in the occupied territories.
â€œIt should be underlined that unfortunately, the Amnesty International in its report has not expressed view on the mass violation of human rights. We would like to believe that the organization will comment on this issue in its future reports. It is known that no international organization has determined the criteria concerning the notion of â€œprisoner of conscienceâ€, no document has been adopted regarding this. The Amnesty International is an international NGO and while determining the prisoners of conscience uses the criteria worked out by its own experts. Therefore, the criteria used by the organization in its studies can not be regarded as generally accepted legal criteria, they express the position of a concrete NGO. The opposite side can regard such a position as objective or nonobjective, biased or unbiased, efficient or inefficient. In this situation, the position demonstrated by both sides has no legal force.

There are hundreds of international NGOs on the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms and if each of these organizations basing on the criteria worked out by them claim that there are prisoners of conscience in various countries, it is not difficult to imagine what will happen.
â€œOf course, we do not doubt the proficiency of the experts of the Amnesty International. But we consider that every serious study must be based on generally accepted criteria. We believe that the Amnesty International will take this recommendation into consideration.â€