The lesson from Russia in the years before 2022 is that the only way to keep a country in the Council of Europe is by insisting that the country abides by the Council’s standards or leaves. Is it already too late in the case of Azerbaijan? It is certainly not too late to try to find out, as a lot depends on it, including whether the Council of Europe can recover its soul on its 75th anniversary.
ESI background: Guide to a Crime Scene - Azerbaijan and the Council of Europe: State repression and those who fight it (3 April 2024)
ESI background: The next war in the Caucasus: Taking Ilham Aliyev seriously (28 March 2024)
ESI newsletter: Azerbaijan thriller – Political prisoners and how to recover the soul of the Council of Europe (28 March 2024)
The Council of Europe was created with high hopes in London in April 1949. In the years leading to the Second World War, its predecessor, League of Nations had failed and would not recover. The Council of Europe, open only to democracies, was supposed to do better.
Reacting to systemic human rights abuses is a matter of European security. Alas, this lesson had been forgotten in the past two decades in the Council of Europe.
The Council of Europe did not react when Putin’s Russia sent troops to Georgia, a Council of Europe member, in 2008. Nor when Boris Nemtsov was killed in front of the Kremlin in 2015. Nor when Russian agents tried to kill Alexey Navalny in 2020. When Russia forcibly annexed Crimea and then invaded Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, only PACE reacted and suspended its voting rights. And then, instead of the Council of Europe putting pressure on Russia, Russia put pressure on the Council of Europe.
In October 2016, Leonid Slutsky, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Russian Duma, insisted: “Russia will return [to PACE] only if certain decisions are changed.” In summer 2017, Russia resorted to financial blackmail, refusing to pay its contribution to the organisation “until full and unconditional restoration of the credentials of the delegation.” In 2018, it dictated its terms: Russia would only return to PACE, and pay its outstanding fees, if the Assembly changed its rules to make it harder to remove credentials ever again. Otherwise, it threatened to leave the organisation altogether. The Council of Europe changed its rules. Leonid Slutksy celebrated this in 2021 as a diplomatic defeat of Ukraine and the Baltic states.
The rest is known. Russia, with its delegation back in PACE, sent Alexey Navalny to a penal colony. It continued to ignore all judgements by the European Court of Human Rights. It used even more violence to suppress critics across Russia. It rolled back its few remaining civic liberties. It moved against its most well-respected human rights organisation, Memorial. It prepared the ground for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This invasion has become the bloodiest war in Europe since the Council of Europe’s founding in 1949. By the time Russia was finally suspended and expelled, massive harm had been done.
In this tragedy, the Council of Europe mattered. Autocrats captured and silenced it. They used their membership as a cover for dismantling human rights at home and preparing wars of aggression abroad. They did not want anyone to sound an alarm. They got away with it.
And today, the regime in Baku tries the same playbook again, confident that it will work once more. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has conquered Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and has been aggressively posturing towards adjacent regions in Armenia. His historical claims and recent military actions signal a serious intent to reclaim perceived Azerbaijani lands by force.
The Council of Europe must recall the fate of the League of Nations, and remember lessons from its own disastrous failure confronting Putin’s Russia. And send two strong and simple messages:
- There can be no political prisoners in any Council of Europe member state.
- There must be no wars of aggression against another Council of Europe member state.
The message from Russia’s expulsion in early 2022 is clear: No member state of the Council of Europe must wage a war of aggression against another member. If that happens, the aggressor will be expelled immediately. The Committee of Ministers should state this clearly, as a general principle, before it is too late again.
The sobering lesson from Russia in the years before 2022 is that in the end, the only way to keep a country in the Council of Europe is not by closing one’s eyes and sacrificing all standards but by insisting, in time, that the country abides by the Council’s standards or leaves. This is the way both to promote human rights and to increase the chance of international peace and security.
Is it already too late in the case of Aliyev’s Azerbaijan? It is certainly not too late to try to find out, as a lot depends on it, including whether the Council of Europe can recover its soul on its 75th anniversary.