Soros Called Aliyev to Stop Pressure on the Civil Society

16:32     26 January, 2015

After his visit to Germany, where he was reminded about human rights violations in Azerbaijan, Aliyev is now in his official visit to Davos, where he takes part in the World Economic Forum. In the framework of this Forum Aliyev had several meeting with different officials during which the sides discussed bilateral relations and prospects for further cooperation.

Much more interesting was Aliyev's meeting with the founder of the Open Society Foundation Foundation George Soros. It should be mentioned that since 1999 the Open Society Foundation has worked in Azerbaijan to improve transparency around oil and gas revenues. In general, as it is written in the official website of this Foundation, "the Open Society Foundations support justice and human rights, freedom of expression, and access to public health and education."

Thus taking into account the priorities of this Foundation, one would, of course, expect that the internal political developments in Azerbaijan would be discussed in the Aliyev-Soros meeting.

In the meeting with Aliyev, George Soros called to stop pressure on the Azerbaijani civil society and to end his persecution of legally registered charitable organizations. The statement of the Open Society Foundation put on their website the day of the Soros-Aliyev meeting and titled "Statement from Open Society on the Crackdown on Rights in Azerbaijan", says: "Over the past few months, Azerbaijan’s government has arrested dozens of political activists, human rights defenders, journalists, bloggers, and lawyers and falsely charged them with crimes ranging from misappropriation of funds to treason. Some have already received lengthy prison sentences." In the statement some names of those imprisoned were mentioned – Leyla Yunus, Intiqam Aliyev, Rasul Jafarov and Khadija Ismayil.

Despite the words of Aliyev who assured the German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Azerbaijan does not have any problems with the Press Freedom Index and all rights and freedoms in his country are preserved, a draft report titled "Protection of media freedom in Europe" says that several countries and among them Azerbaijan have deteriorating situation of journalists, independent media and freedom of speech. The report calls Baku to immediately release the imprisoned journalists and cease their harassment.  

These calls, reports and statements are, of course, important in terms of keeping Azerbaijan sober and not letting it to deepen its "soft" policy towards its civil society. However, it does not seem that the criticism of the International Community have contributed or will contribute to the improvement of the internal political situation in Azerbaijan, as the leader of that country seems to be more than sure that his country is one of the most democratic countries in the world and others should see it as a good example.