A number of British senators become tools legitimizing Aliyev’s autocracy
In years gone by, the two members of the House of Lords had been political enemies, running the headquarters of rival parties during hotly contested general election battles. In October, however, they stood side by side to pay their respects to the former president of Azerbaijan, The Guardian writes.
A wreath laid at Heydar Aliyev’s grave in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, bore three names: Iain McNicol, Labour’s former general secretary, Darren Mott, the former chief executive of the Conservatives, and Tahir Gözel, a prominent local businessman who had paid for the peers’ visit. Lord McNicol and Lord Mott are identified in a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) as the most recent in a line of peers to have taken free trips to Azerbaijan, giving support to the government of President Ilham Aliyev.
All of the peers’ trips were properly registered and there is no suggestion they have broken any rules. However, human rights groups are concerned that endorsements given by members of the UK’s upper legislature risk legitimising an authoritarian state. Azerbaijan’s rulers have been accused of ethnic cleansing, the repression of political opposition, and imprisonment and persecution of journalists and activists. A number of peers have accepted paid-for trips to act as observers during elections, most recently for a ballot in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, whose government was overthrown by Azerbaijan during a military offensive last year. One senior Labour peer, David Evans, held business contracts with the state-owned oil company through his publishing company. Lord Evans also made use of the House of Lords banqueting facilities for two events to support Azerbaijan’s interests. Evans, a printing entrepreneur who supplied trade unions with ballots and campaign material, is, in his own words, a “very good friend to Azerbaijan”. From April 2020 to May 2024, he was a member of the Azerbaijan all-party parliamentary group, established to develop good relationships between the UK and Azerbaijan. In March 2022, Evans hosted an event in parliament’s red-carpeted Attlee Room to mark 30 years of diplomatic relations between the UK and the former Soviet state. Standing before the assembled dignitaries, he read out a poem he had composed to mark the occasion. “This is a partnership that’s built to last,” he proclaimed. The verses celebrated a partnership between BP and the state oil company, Socar, and Azerbaijan’s six-week war with Armenia in 2020. With regard to Nagorno-Karabakh, he said, “Thank God we got it back!”. In January 2023, Evans’ younger son, while working as a researcher in the Lords for his father, secured a three-month paid role with Socar’s trading arm in Geneva as a sustainability intern from January to March 2023. Evans said his son paid “personally for his own accommodation, food and travel”. Socar said it had paid in line with Swiss minimum wage requirements, and that Evans’ son had been hired after consideration of potential conflicts of interest by its compliance team after he expressed an interest in a short internship. Another banqueting room of the House of Lords was put to use by Lord Evans to promote Azerbaijan’s interests in the UK in October 2017. Records show Evans hosted a dinner for 60 people in the peers’ dining room overlooking the Thames, paid for by Socar. In October this year, Evans hosted a breakfast reception in the Cholmondeley Room, on the terrace of the Houses of Parliament, marking the start of an energy summit in London. Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the UK, Elin Suleymanov, attended and met Philip Hunt, the UK minister for energy and net zero, who gave his support for Baku’s hosting of Cop29.
Evans is not the only member of parliament’s upper chamber to have supported Azerbaijan’s polls. In September, a year after 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh during another military operation, the Liberal Democrat peer Qurban Hussain had his travel, accommodation and subsistence paid for by Azerbaijan’s parliament for a four-day trip to observe parliamentary elections in the region.
Local media reported that Lord Hussain had been invited by Suleymanov, the ambassador, to observe “elections in the cities of Shusha and Fuzuli.” At a press conference, Hussain described the elections as “not very different from what we see in the UK” and said: “I felt the joy of people in Shusha.” The EPDE called the elections “undemocratic”.
