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By Zaur Gurbanli

For over a period of a year and a half, Azerbaijan refuses to issue a visa to Christoph Strasser, the raporteur of the Parlaimentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Political Prisoners in Azerbaijan. For that reason, so says Strasser, he cannot visit Azerbaijan and do his job – namely prepare reports about the plight of political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Maybe it is good thing after all, and I will explain why.

A while ago we saw the discussions held at the Council of which focused on the Azerbaijan’s parliamentary elections of 2010. In those discussions, we saw all kind of Europeans – honest and dishonest people. Honest people are honest, but I wanted to focus on the dishonest ones. Here are a few examples of the people in the latter category:

Tadeusz Iwinski, an election observer during the Azerbaijani parliamentary elections of 2010: “In general, this election process was a progress in compliance with the OSCE standards.”

Konstantin Kosachev from Russia: “It is wrong to evaluate the elections as “good or bad”. We must look at the general dynamics of the elections. When we look at the dynamics, we can say the elections both in Azerbaijan and in Moldova were good.”
British lawmaker Michael Hancock: “Elections in Azerbaijan met expectations of the majority.”

Now, I predict that Sir Christoph Strasser, who is unable to get a visa to Azerbaijan, is exactly in the category of the people that I just described. Here are my two reasons for that:

First, from what Strasser says, since his appointment to the position of the rappoteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on political prisoners in Azerbaijan, he has been unable to get a visa to Azerbaijan. So, it appears that the Azerbaijani Embassy to Germany has been mocking the Council of Europe official for a year and a half and... Mr. Strasser started speaking out about it only now – after the Azeri media started accusing him of doing nothing. And how exactly does Mr. Strasser complain? By saying “hey, I will protest, I will tell on you...” If you are really interested in political prisoners, you could have lodged your complaint 18 months ago. Or at least, you could prepare a report without coming to Azerbaijan and note something like “the Azerbaijani government didn’t allow me to visit Azerbaijan to do my research, so I am doing my best under the circumstances.” But Mr. Strasser didn’t do that. In fact, he didn’t do anything.

Second, in his latest statement Mr. Strasser threatened Azerbaijan government demanding to let him visit the country. However, at the end of his statement he added a phrase which basically nullified all his threats and demands: “I do not share the view that there is no opposition represented in the current parliament of Azerbaijan”. People who know Azerbaijan would know that such a statement is a political statement which says Mr. Strasser is totally supportive of... the repressive policies of the Azerbaijani government. There is no opposition in the Azerbaijani parliament, dude! And that is the trademark of the parliamentary elections of 2010 in Azerbaijan.

* Zaur Gurbanli is a blogger from Azerbaijan and a columnist for abzas.net.