Azerbaijan under President Ilham Aliyev is notorious for its international corrupt networks, especially when it comes to the observation of elections in the country. In 2018, Azerbaijan stood in the centre of the largest corruption scandal in the history of the Council of Europe when it became evident that the country bought political support from several members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the eldest European human rights institution.
On 9 February 2020 Azerbaijan held early parliamentary elections. Anton Shekhovtsov investigates for EPDE how politically biased international election observers, including politicians from several European national and regional parliaments, were again engaged in whitewashing the fraudulent elections.Through this, Ilham Aliyev’s regime again relativizes and discredits critical findings of the International Election Observation Mission formed by OSCE/ODIHR, the Parliamentary Assemblies of the OSCE and of the Council of Europe, as well as of the independent domestic election observers from the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Centre (EMDS) – EPDE’s member organization in Azerbaijan.
The full report is available in English on the EPDE website.
EPDE Publication by Anton Shekhovtsov
