Azernews.Az

By Jamila Babayeva

The U.S. State Department's report on human rights in Azerbaijan in 2013 is biased, the spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said.

Like the previous years, it represents a situation which differs from the real situation where human rights and democracy is concerned, Elman Abdullayev told Trend on March 3.

The U.S. State Department published its annual report on the state of human rights in the world, criticizing some aspects of human rights in Azerbaijan.

"There was no cooperation with Azerbaijani state bodies to ensure the objectivity of the document. It is based on the subjective judgments of suspicious sources, and reflects unfounded accusations," Abdullayev added.

He said based on the experience of the previous years, and in order to prevent the U.S. from publishing another biased document full of "methodological mistakes", Azerbaijani state organizations provided the U.S. State Department with comments on similar previous reports.

"Unfortunately, neither these comments, nor the Azerbaijani government's important legal and practical actions towards the improvement of human rights protection during the reporting period, were reflected in the document," he noted.

He added that the State Department's report on the current status of human rights does not reflect reality.

"If the goal is improving human rights in the world, we urge the U.S. to make more efforts to improve the international human rights mechanisms," he said. "Publishing such a biased document against Azerbaijan, which has created a strong and effective system for protecting human rights in the country, is nothing but an effort to exert political pressure."