Azerbaijan thriller - Political prisoners and how to recover the soul of the Council of Europe

Huge interest in corruption and the Council of Europe in Germany www.esiweb.org 6 A thriller, a documentary and the real story In the thriller On the edge, Gerd, a German member of the Bundestag and PACE from the Ruhr region, stumbles across a major corruption scandal. [...] The website of the Azeri Presidency writes about the meeting: “The Secretary General of the Council of Europe commended the reforms implemented in Azerbaijan under the leadership of President Ilham Aliyev”. [...] Ambassadors in the Committee of Ministers in Strasbourg Article 3 of the Statute of the Council of Europe refers to the key notion of sincere collaboration in the realisation of fundamental freedoms in all Council of Europe member states: “Every member of the Council of Europe must accept the principles of the rule of law and of the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights. [...] Breaking the silence To break its silence, the Committee of Ministers might turn to the wisdom of the Council of Europe’s founders, recall the fate of the League of Nations, and remember lessons from its own disastrous failure confronting Putin’s Russia. [...] 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.