Baku, September 17, 2025
The Council of Europe’s focus on technical compliance rather than core values enables the government to use nominally anti-corruption laws for repression against dissent.
By Ilgar Mammadov, Founding Member of Republican Alternative (REAL) Party
When it is said that the Council of Europe’s work against corruption in Azerbaijan has not only been inefficient and formalist but has also been instrumentalized by the authorities for a crackdown on civil society, these are not empty words.
Azerbaijan has made practically no progress in the Transparency International annual Corruption Perceptions Index since its accession to the Council. At the same time, anti-corruption laws, as amended upon insistence from the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), have become a practical weapon against internationally funded civil society activists.
To illustrate this observation, let us look at Articles 313, 308, and 193-1 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Today, these articles are often used to prosecute activists.
GRECO’s 2006 “Joint First and Second Evaluation Rounds Evaluation Report” made several initial recommendations to Azerbaijan. Recommendation XVII stated: review the provisions on accounting offences and establish appropriate sanctions fully in line with Articles 14 and 19 of the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption (hereinafter – Convention).
In response to the recommendation, the authorities recalled, as reflected in the GRECO 2008 Report, that the use of false or incomplete information in accounting records and the destruction or hiding of accounting records can entail criminal liability under Article 313 of the Criminal Code as “service fraud.”
GRECO was not satisfied with this minimalist approach. In its “Addendum to the Report,” adopted in 2010 and discussing compliance in the context of the dissuasiveness and effectiveness of legal safeguards, GRECO noted that “[e]ven though the sanctions listed in Article 313 include imprisonment and confiscation of property, they – as indicated before – cannot be imposed on persons working in the private sector or on legal persons.”
Indeed, Article 19 of the Convention directly calls for sanctions against everyone, that is, natural persons as well.
The government heard this point and put GRECO’s recommendation into practical use very soon: in 2013, it launched an unprecedented attack on civil society, prosecuting individual activists under the same Article 313. The new wave of attacks, which started in 2023, is also using the same article in the very interpretation imposed by GRECO.
Speaking of Article 308, in paragraph 58 of the Report adopted in 2010, the GRECO Evaluation Team recalled that Articles 7 and 8 of the Convention unambiguously refer to “any persons who direct or work for, in any capacity, private sector entities” without any restrictions as to the functions or responsibilities of the person or the legal status of the private sector entity, including entities without legal personality, as well as individuals.
Moreover, in paragraph 54, the GRECO Evaluation Team was not satisfied that, in the newly amended Article 308 of the Criminal Code, the concept of “representatives of international organisations” is narrower than the concept of “any” officials or other employees of international organisations used by Article 9 of the Convention.
Therefore, it recommended ensuring that legislation concerning bribery in the private sector covers, in an unequivocal manner, the full range of persons who direct or work for, in any capacity, any private sector entity.
Responding to these demands, the Government of Azerbaijan amended Article 308 on 24 June 2011 by adding individuals and any employees of international organizations to the definition of possible perpetrators. The change was welcomed in the “Compliance Report on Azerbaijan,” adopted by GRECO at its 57th Plenary Meeting in Strasbourg on 15-19 October 2012.
Finally, Article 193-1. It is a very serious criminal offence, one under which many civil society activists face charges today. In its “Joint First and Second Evaluation Rounds Evaluation Report on Azerbaijan” in 2006, the GRECO Evaluation Team noted that the criminalisation of money laundering was limited at the time of its visit. However, to please GRECO, by the time of the Report, the authorities in Azerbaijan had informed it that in May 2006 they enacted a new Article 193-1 in the Criminal Code to address the said concern.
The Council of Europe is not the only organization to which the government has been promoting this Article as a sign of its commitment to combat corruption. To the OECD, it reported in 2017 that it is undertaking both judicial improvements and training and seminars about Article 193-1, based on methodological recommendations and other materials.
In the end, civil society activists have become a primary target of all these three articles.
This is just a brief illustration. When a member government constantly fails to comply with the fundamental values of the club – such as free and fair elections – and then gets positive publicity from the Council of Europe, reinforced by its controlled media, all this ends up with innocent critics and civil society activists being regularly locked up.
And then the Council says, “OK, let us wait for the European Court judgment.” When the Court judgment is ignored for years, the Council says, “Let us engage with the government,” which, in practical terms, means surrendering the core values.
Without decisively addressing the fundamentals of Azerbaijan’s membership – free and fair elections in the first place – all the decades of usual talk about “limited progress in some areas” or “re-engagement” is just propaganda by selfish and narrow-minded Strasbourg bureaucrats.
The views expressed in this op-ed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Azerbaijan.US. The platform provides space for diverse voices in order to foster open debate.
