Speaker, MPs meet Azerbaijan ruler Ilham Aliyev on sham election day

Speaker Anglu Farrugia met the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev on the day when controversial elections were being held in the county.

Also present for the visit were Labour MP Joe Debono Grech, a former rapporteur for the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly to Azerbaijan, Labour MP Joseph M. Sammut, and Nationalist MP Frederick Azzopardi.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s office for democratic institutions and human rights also cancelled its mission to observe the oil-rich nation’s elections of 1 November, saying it had no choice due to restrictions imposed by the Azerbaijani authorities.

Mainstream opposition parties, including Musavat and the Popular Front, boycotted the poll, blaming unfair election campaign rules. International rights groups have denounced the vote as an “imitation election,” and many analysts say the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Aliyev’s New Azerbaijan Party was given free television air time in the lead up to the poll. But opposition groups were forced to pay commercial rates, which they say made it unaffordable to reach a wide audience.

Over the past two years, Aliyev’s government has cracked down heavily on opposition and human rights groups, which many activists say has silenced dissent and curbed freedoms.

VIDEO Maltese MPs meet Aliyev

The official media of Azerbaijan reported that during his meeting with the Maltese Speaker of the House, Aliyev “touched upon the parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan. Aliyev told Farrigua that the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights was invited to observe the parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan, but this organization grossly violated its mandate and decided not to monitor the elections without raising this issue at the Standing Committee of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and without informing the OSCE Secretary General.”

On his part Speaker Anglu Farrugia was reported saying that he recalled with pleasure his visits to Azerbaijan, as well as his meeting with President Ilham Aliyev, when he visited the country as part of a delegation of OSCE and the Council of Europe four years ago.

Aliyev was reported to have emphasized that the relations between the two countries were developing successfully, in a reference to the ElectoGas plant that is in part being developed by state oil company SOCAR. “Noting that the two countries enjoyed very close and friendly ties, the head of state said Azerbaijan wants to develop partnership relations with Malta.”

In October 2013, Farrugia described elections in Azerbaijan – which yielded a staggering 85% to incumbent autocrat Ilham Aliyev – as “fair, democratic and transparent” during a meeting with his Azeri counterpart, Ogtay Asadov.
His assessment conflicted with that of observers from OSCE who said they had also documented “widespread irregularities, including ballot-box stuffing and what appeared to be fraudulent counting”.

READ MORE ‘Democratic and transparent’ – Anglu Farrugia’s verdict on Azeri sham elections

Labour MP Joe Debono Grech had also failed to make any mention of imprisoned human rights activist Anar Mammadali during a Council of Europe parliamentary assembly debate on Azerbaijan, after having himself flagged the politically-motivated imprisonment back in 2013.

As former co-rapporteur on Azerbaijan, Debono Grech in a debate on a new report on Azerbaijan’s ailing democratic institutions, seemed to complain that Azerbaijan was never absent from the CoE’s parliamentary assembly’s agenda, and warned that the oil and gas-rich republic could head down the road of Libya or Iraq if president Ilham Aliyev is removed.

“Let’s make it clear, I do not condone dictatorships,” Debono Grech later told MaltaToday, adding that Azerbaijan is “not a democracy”.

However, in the same breath he said that Azerbaijan’s situation was delicate given its geographical position and insisted that “the Council of Europe cannot remove the government as the Azerbaijani opposition expects”.