Azerbaijan visits by MEPs under scrutiny

Six MEPs breached European Parliament rules when they failed to declare on time the visits to Azerbaijan they made last October, according to an advisory committee that monitors compliance with the Parliament's code of conduct.

The five-member committee informed Martin Schulz, the president of the Parliament, of its findings last week.

It is now up to Schulz to decide what action, if any, to take. Schulz is supposed to ask the MEPs concerned to comment before taking a decision.

European Voice reported in October that nine MEPs had gone to Baku privately to observe a presidential election easily won by Ilham Aliyev, the incumbent. Most of the trips had been organised and sponsored by Azerbaijan's parliament and by two organisations that refused to reveal the source of their funding, the Society for the Promotion of German-Azerbaijani Relations (GEFDAB) in Berlin and the European Academy for Elections Observation (EAEO), registered in Belgium.

Alexandra Thein, a German liberal MEP invited by GEFDAB, made her declaration on 14 October, three days after her return from Baku. Another MEP had paid for the trip himself and was therefore not obliged to declare it, while another had declared it but on the wrong form.

The remaining six MEPs made their declarations only in January, having been prompted by the advisory committee. A committee source said that it had found a “manifest violation of the code of conduct” in those six cases.

The advisory committee is expected to decide in the coming weeks whether to take action against Louis Michel, a Belgian Liberal MEP, who has been accused of submitting amendments to the Commission proposal for a new data-protection regime that had been drafted by industry groups. Two other cases are at the preliminary stages. One concerns Rachida Dati, a centre-right French MEP and former cabinet minister. As a lawyer who reportedly represents Gaz de France, she allegedly failed to declare a possible conflict of interest. The other concerns undeclared trips by several MEPs to China last October.

ANN.Az