The Europa League final on Wednesday in Baku is just the latest major sporting event Azerbaijan has hosted in an attempt to smooth over its atrocious human rights record.
Hosting events such as the 2015 European Games and an annual Formula 1 Grand Prix, the oil-rich Caspian nation has spent its petrodollars to assert itself on the world’s sporting map.
Following the Europa League final between British teams Arsenal and Chelsea, Baku is already lined up as a venue for Euro 2020 matches.
“Each of these events strengthens Azerbaijan’s place on the world map and creates the conditions for boosting tourism,” Azerbaijan’s Minister of Sport Azad Rahimov told AFP, boasting of the “83 million viewers that watched the Formula 1 Grand Prix held in Baku in 2018.”
But rights groups say hosting such glitzy competitions helps the ex-Soviet country of some 10 million people to conceal systematic political repression and widespread corruption under the Aliyev dynasty that has ruled since 1993.
“We must ensure that Azerbaijan isn’t allowed to ‘sportswash’ its appalling human rights record as a result of the football fanfare,” said Amnesty International’s UK director, Kate Allen.
Human Rights Watch said in a report last year “at least 43 human rights defenders, journalists, political and religious activists remained wrongfully imprisoned” in Azerbaijan.
It said other persistent abuses included “systemic torture, undue interference in the work of lawyers and restrictions on media freedoms”.
The anti-corruption NGO Transparency International this year ranked Azerbaijan 152 out of 180 countries in its index of perceptions of corruption.
“The leaders of authoritarian countries like to organize grandiose events. That’s their whim,” said prominent Azerbaijani opposition journalist Khadija Ismayilova, who has spent years in prison for her investigations.
“The projects also enable corruption,” she said. “The company that organises the Formula 1 motor race in Baku is owned by the son of the sports minister. This is undisguised corruption.”
The sports minister in question, for his part, defended Azerbaijan’s “sports diplomacy” as “a legacy left to the people.”
