Epress.am News from Armenia
The Standing Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has condemned Azerbaijan’s use of a Council of Europe prisoner transfer treaty in order to justify the immediate release of an Azerbaijani soldier, Ramil Safarov, who was convicted of murdering an Armenian soldier in Hungary in 2004, once he had returned to his home country.
In a resolution adopted during its meeting in Brussels, based on a report by Christopher Chope (United Kingdom, EC), the Standing Committee, which brings together around 60 leading members of PACE and acts in its name, said the use of Article 12 of the Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons in the case of Ramil Safarov was “a violation of the principles of good faith in international relations and of the rule of law”.
Safarov was convicted in 2007 of murdering an Armenian fellow participant, Gurgen Margaryan, during a “Partnership for Peace” NATO training course in Hungary and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of release for 30 years. After serving eight years of his sentence in Hungary, he was transferred to Azerbaijan under the Convention’s Article 12, which allows the transfer of foreign prisoners to their home countries for primarily humanitarian reasons. The same article allows sovereign countries to grant pardons or amnesty to those imprisoned.
Once Ramil Safarov arrived in Azerbaijan, he was greeted as a national hero and granted an immediate pardon, “ long before the expiry of the minimum sentence set by the Hungarian court, a retroactive promotion as well as other rewards.”
The Convention is “not designed to be used for the immediate release of prisoners upon return to their home country”, the parliamentarians pointed out.
“The Assembly recalls that the principles of good faith in international relations, recognised, inter alia, by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and of the rule of law require that treaties be interpreted in line with their objects and purposes.”