As a result of the Armenian delegation’s address delivered during the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Bureau session, and with respect to Ramil Safarov’s extradition to and subsequent pardoning in Azerbaijan, the PACE President commissioned to examine this matter, the Armenian delegation’s head Davit Harutyunyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am.     

In his words, the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights as well as the Monitoring Committee will study this matter.    

“Armenia hopes that this time the Council of Europe will operatively and adequately react to this impermissible act. Otherwise, this could further deepen the ethnic intolerance, xenophobia, and discrimination existing among the Council of Europe-member states.   

We wish to call upon PACE to address this matter as soon as possible. Values must not only be preached, but also be consistently applied. Otherwise, we would assist the brutal crime committed on national or religious grounds,” Davit Harutyunyan specifically said at the Bureau session.

Armenian News-NEWS.am reported earlier that Ramil Safarov, a lieutenant in the Azerbaijani military, was extradited on August 31 from Hungary, where he was serving a life sentence—and with no expression of either regret or remorse—for the premeditated axe murder of Armenian lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan, in his sleep, during a NATO Partnership for Peace program in Budapest back in 2004.

As expected, Ramil Safarov’s return to Baku was welcomed, as was his act of murder, by the officials of president Ilham Aliyev’s government and much of Azerbaijani society, and the Azerbaijani president immediately granted him a pardon.

And Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan announced on August 31 that Armenia is suspending its diplomatic ties with Hungary.