Azerbaijan: jury dismissed

After toying with the idea of introducing jury trials, the Azerbaijani government now has dropped the initiative altogether, choosing to keep the court system to itself.

For a country that now chairs the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, the continent’s main human-rights body, that might seem a strange move. But government-supporters say they do not trust lay citizens’ judgment in matters of law. Critics counter that the government just doesn’t want to let go of its grip on the judiciary system.

MP Ali Huseynli, representing the ruling Yeni Azerbaijan Party, allegedly sees jury systems as a Western thingamajigy that doesn’t work in this former Soviet republic.

“Jurors are mainly people who do not have a law education and, therefore, often they cannot make legal judgments,” Huseynli commented as he and his fellow lawmakers axed the jury-amendment from a bill on courts and judges last week.

Prosecutors, he added, had advised against introducing the jury system.  

Critics counter that the real issue is that juries and jurors would mean more work for prosecutors and more room for court independence. “The practice [of jury trials] would have ended politically motivated prosecutions of citizens on fabricated charges,” commented lawyer Namizad Safarov, Contact.az reported. 

The jury-system proposal stemmed from the influence of international organizations, he added, calling the decision to ditch the amendment “another step away from democracy.”   

Azerbaijan has a dismal reputation for prosecuting public dissenters,especially journalists and activists. This year alone has seen a flurry of arrests and sentences that human rights groups describe as reprisals for defying the government of President Ilham Aliyev.

Azerbaijan, however, is not the only South-Caucasus country with a distaste for trials by jury. Armenia’s general prosecutor and Constitutional Court chairperson both think the Armenian judicial system can’t handle it, according to Armenpress. Georgia rolled out jury trials in 2011, but with a restricted scope of application.

Bakudaily.az