The European Union has condemned the long jail sentences handed down this week to two Azeri opposition politicians by a court in Azerbaijan.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and the European commissioner for the EU’s neighbourhood policy, Štefan Füle, today (20 March) said that the cases against Ilgar Mammadov and Tofiq Yaqublu “appear politically motivated” and “contrary to Azerbaijan’s international commitments as a member of the Council of Europe”.

Azerbaijan should take over the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of Europe, Europe’s human-rights watchdog, in mid-May.

The secretary-general of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland, last year criticised the conduct of the trial, saying that the Council of Europe had been denied access to the initial hearing last February and had not been allowed to visit Mammadov. “I urgently call on the Azeri authorities to engage in dialogue with the international community,” he said.

Jagland’s office says that he raised Mammadov’s case with the member states of the Council of Europe yesterday, expressing disappointment at the harsh sentence. He has also taken the case up again with the Azeri authorities.

Mammadov was sentenced on Monday (17 March) to seven years in prison for allegedly “organising mass riots” and for “use of violence against police officers” in the town of Ismailli.

Yaqublu was sentenced to five years, on similar charges. Another 15 people were also sentenced.

When the riot broke out on 23 January 2013, neither Mammadov nor Yaqublu was in the town, according to independent reports from the time.   Yaqublu was deputy chairman of the Musavat Party, while Mammadov is the chairman of an opposition political group, the REAL (Republican Alternative) movement. Mammadov’s career includes a brief stint at the International Crisis Group, an international think-tank.

At the time of his arrest in early February 2013, Mammadov was REAL’s probable candidate in presidential elections. Azerbaijan’s central election commission subsequently refused to register Mammadov as a candidate, declaring that some of the signatures that his party had collected were falsified. The commission’s chairman, Mazahir Panahov, said that US diplomats have been involved in checking the signatures, a claim rejected by the US.

The elections, which were held in October, returned Ilham Aliev to power for third five-year term, with 84.5% of the vote.

Election observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) found significant problems with every stage of the campaign, including intimidation of candidates and voters, the stuffing of ballot boxes, and intimidation of journalists. It assessed 58% of observed polling stations as bad or very bad.

Ashton’s and Füle’s criticisms of Azerbaijan are likely to be reflected in a European Commission report on Azerbaijan expected to be published next week. The report is one of a set of annual reviews of relations between the European Union and neighbouring countries that are currently being finalised.

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The European Parliament called for Mammadov’s immediate and unconditional release last June.

Azerbaijan’s presidency

Azerbaijan has said that it intends to use its presidency of the Council of Europe to give impetus to inter-religious, inter-cultural and inter-communal dialogue. 

Officials say that the Council of Europe and Azerbaijan are currently a plan of actions that the Council would like Azerbaijan to take in the three principal areas of which the Council sees itself as a guardian: pluralist democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Freedom of assembly and freedom of the media are two of the major areas of concern.

The Council of Europe’s committee of ministers, over which Azerbaijan will preside, has the ability to suspend and expel a member state. The Council currently has 47 member states. Historically, the committee has relied primarily on ratcheting up its public critique and applying diplomatic pressure, though it suspended Greece’s membership after the Greek military seized power in Athens in 1967.

In 1980, Turkey opted to cede its upcoming presidency of the Council because of a military coup. No other presidency has been halted or halted itself since the Council’s creation in 1949.

The Council of Europe includes a set of bodies, chief among them the European Court of Human Rights. It also provides a political forum, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which has its own means of applying pressure on member states. PACE last year briefly considered opening a formal monitoring process for Hungary, the first time such a step would have been taken against a long-standing member.