Basing on minor technical pretexts, the Ministry of Justice liquidated the registration of Election Monitoring Center on 14 April 2008, three months after the organization got registration. According to the chairman of the EMC, Anar Mammadli (right) “the closure of the center is directly connected with the 15 October presidential elections. We have right to freedom of association. Utilizing this right we’ll continue our work with or without registration”.
(16-MAY-08)
Written by Shahla Ismailova/HRH Azerbaijan on the basis of materials from EMC, Turan Info Agency, IRFS.
On the 8-th of May 2008, the Ministry of Justice appealed to the Khatai District Court to invalidate and revoke the Election Monitoring Center´s (EMC) registration.
The claims of Ministry of Justice were:
• EMC´s founders are either misstated or ambiguous in the registration application
• EMC did not notify the Ministry of Justice when EMC changed its legal address
• EMC did not notify the Ministry of Justice about its eight local offices
The Ministry of Justice revoked EMC´s registration without due process of law. During registration, the Ministry of Justice did not inform EMC about any problems with its registration documents. The Ministry of Justice had more than one month to thoroughly analyze the registration
documents and should have addressed these problems during the registration process. According to the Law on Non-Governmental Organizations (public associations and funds), an organization’s registration can be revoked only if it receives more than two written warnings or instructions to correct legal infractions during a one year period. EMC registered on February 1st, and EMC has not been sent any warnings or instructions during the intervening time period.
Experts’ opinion
The EMC’s lawyer Intigam Aliyev says that the local NGO should demand 60,000 AZN as compensation from the Justice Ministry for its failure to accept EMC’s registration papers over a period of two years and then the returning of the registration documents six times. I. Aliyev appealed to the court, noting that the Justice Ministry is blatantly violating the European Convention on Human Rights, and although perhaps minor mistakes have been made in the paperwork of EMC, it is not grounds to close the NGO. Aliyev emphasized that as the European Convention in a legal sense has superiority over the Republic of Azerbaijan’s legislation and Civil Code, the court must throw out this case.
Azerbaijani Lawyers Association Chairman Annagi Hajibeyli said in the event that the Justice Ministry’s lawsuits against EMC were groundless. “If the information about the organization’s founder was not clear EMC should have never been given registration.”
IRFS Chairman Emin Huseynov said, “Our organization is engaged in speech freedom. This trial was intriguing for us as well. We participated in the hearing. This organization will be considered a formal information source if it has official registration. Its registration was annulled. Several mass media means will be deprived of official information about the elections. That is why we are involved in this case.”
