[ 22 May 2015 18:29 ]
“The spirit of the Riga summit’s declaration is alien to the nature of EU-Azerbaijan cooperation”
Riga. Malahat Najafova – APA. Azerbaijan has tried to block some provisions of the final declaration of the Eastern Partnership summit, President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz said on Friday.
According to Martin Schulz, the Azerbaijani side has disagreed with some provisions.
He said his attitude towards Azerbaijan’s domestic policy is clear-cut. However, he also added that he is willing to continue dialogue with the Azerbaijani government.
Novruz Mammadov, the deputy head of the Presidential Administration and director of the Foreign Relations Department, reacted to Schulz’s remarks, saying he always makes anti-Azerbaijan statements with various pretexts.
“Azerbaijan is always on his mind, in his thought, while this summit aims to define and review the current state, problems, and prospects of cooperation between the European Union and Eastern Partnership states.
Without doubt, we state our position on cooperating with the European Union. We have seriously rebutted the final declaration of this forum. We deem the spirit of the declaration alien to the nature of EU-Azerbaijan cooperation. Azerbaijan is a post-Soviet state that has been successfully and comprehensively cooperating with the European Union. But the declaration’s provisions regarding Azerbaijan do not correspond to that spirit. At the same time, we are dissatisfied with the approach towards the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. We clearly expressed it all to the EU leadership and the delegations of all participating countries.
There was huge tension in this regard. We approve the declaration generally, but by expressing our special position. We will state our special position in written form. We are closely cooperating with the European Union on energy, political reforms, and counter-terrorism. There’s no second such country. We shouldn’t be equated with other countries.
The Azerbaijani president has repeatedly said that our ties with the EU must have a special character and there must be bilateral strategic partnership. We seek to build our relations in this direction.
We proposed and demanded this time again that we should not build relations with the EU on the same scale as with others but on the basis of a document on strategic partnership. This was the theme of the negotiations. If our proposals are not taken into consideration, we will in future state our position on this cooperation and its nature,” said Mammadov.
