Baku, Azerbaijan, May 16
By Elmira Tariverdiyeva – Trend:
Fazil Gurbanov, the president of the All-Russian Azerbaijani Congress, has appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin with a request to pay special attention to the situation that has emerged regarding the Congress.
“We completely reject the decision of the [Russian] Supreme Court!” Gurbanov said in an appeal posted on the website of the Congress. “We express hope that the highest judicial authorities of the Russian Federation will treat our arguments and concerns with understanding.”
On May 15, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation made an unprecedented decision to liquidate Azerbaijan’s largest diaspora organization, the All-Russian Azerbaijani Congress, reads the statement.
The Congress, which unites more than 2 million Azerbaijanis living almost in all regions of Russia, was established in 2001 on the initiative of the late President of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, the statement said.
Throughout 16 years of its activity, the organization has played a huge role in strengthening of civil peace and interethnic harmony in Russia, development and deepening of socio-economic and cultural cooperation between Russia and Azerbaijan, according to the statement.
Gurbanov noted that mistakes were made in the Congress’s activity in past years in the records and documents management, at times there was no prompt reaction to the letters of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, the meetings of the Central Council of the Congress were not held in due time, etc.
The most important thing is that the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation has not put forward any accusations regarding the organization’s activity, Gurbanov noted, adding this means that the ministry fully approves of the organization’s positive activity aimed at strengthening of relations between Russia and Azerbaijan, as well as the great work on integration of Azerbaijanis into Russia’s legal environment.
In fact, all the charges – grounded and ungrounded ones – are of purely technical nature and are not at all correlated to the fundamental tasks of the organization, which successfully solves them, the statement said.
“At a trial, we stated that the new leadership of the organization had already done a lot of work to eliminate the mistakes made earlier, developed a set of measures preventing the repetition of such faults in the future,” Gurbanov said. “However, the earlier adopted decision was executed through the court.”
“I think the decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation is flawed and counterproductive!” Gurbanov said in his statement. “In fact, it is infringing the civil rights of Azerbaijanis in Russia.”
“But, unfortunately, we were not heard,” Gurbanov added. “The decision of the Supreme Court can have far-reaching consequences.”