A PORTRAIT OF DECEPTION. Monitoring Azerbaijan or Why Pedro Agramunt should resign (ESI - European Stability Initiative, 2013)
There are very few fellow members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) who have been to Azerbaijan as regularly over the past decade as Pedro Agramunt, the conservative Spanish senator, a businessman from Valencia. Agramunt has been consistent in this approach to Azerbaijan: from the very beginning of his relationship with Baku he has been a defender of the Aliyev regime. The latest monitoring report is his masterpiece. || The Agramunt/Grech report is supposed to assess whether Azerbaijan, as a member of the Council of Europe since 2001, has fulfilled the commitments it took upon itself when it joined the organisation. In fact, it is a sophisticated effort to hide a simple truth, a portrait of deception: in all areas a democracy cannot do without - from free and fair elections to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or basic political and human rights, including the rule of law through an independent judiciary - the situation in Azerbaijan, already terrible a decade ago, is even worse today