Reporter's Notebook Comments

• Generally, this report is correct, but there is no information about the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which Azerbaijan joined and is leading by example of transparency in the state oil fund. Also, the work of the comission against corruption has been portrayed in the wrong way, because in reality they have been dealing with citizen requests (as happened to me personally) very effectively.
  
  
• "The Reporter's Notebook (hereinafter, "the essay") is an accurate reflection of the views that the average Bakuvian has about corruption in Azerbaijan. However, it also reflects one of the principal problems in the manner in which Azerbaijanis analyze corruption in their country, specifically, a heavy reliance on anecdotal information in the absense of hard facts. For example, there are numerous stories about bribes and the cost of doing business in the courts and before other governmental institutions. Yet, there is no schedule of bribes, no routine fee that is paid for any service, as the essay suggests. The amount of bribes that an individual may pay depends on a variety of circumstances that change from case-to-case, such as the parties to the bribe, the amount of money that an individual has available to pay the bribe, the location of the government office, and the negotiating skills of the parties.
  
  Although bribery is widespread in Azerbaijan, and it is commonly known that students pay bribes to teachers, and that litigants pay bribes to judges, bribery is still a secret crime, and Azerbaijanis make great efforts to keep it a secret. Therefore, it is impossible to determine whether there are routine bribe fees that must be paid for specific services. For example, some teachers who solicit bribes from students will designate a favorite student to act as an intermediary for the purpose of collecting money from the other students, which provides a certain distance between the person paying the bribe and the person receiving the bribe. This gives the professor a certain deniability about whether he solicited the bribe. The survey that the Dalga Youth Movement made of bribery in the universities, which is described in the essay, was problematic for its lack of detail, and illustrates the problem of data collection by anecdote. While I served as the American Bar Association's Anti-Corruption Advisor in Azerbaijan, I worked closely with Dalga, and acted as an advisor to its chairman, Ramin Hajili. I reviewed the actual questionnaires that Dalga used for its survey in 2005. Dalga obtained about 500 completed questionnaires --not 5,000, as the essay states-- from students at various universities. All of the questionnaries were completed anonymously, and they asked questions not only about bribery but about a host of other problems that concerned students. There were two or three general questions relating to bribery on the questionnaire, and they did not request specific information about particular bribe incidents, such as the names of the participants; the amount of the bribe; what the bribe was for; and whether the service was delivered after the bribe was paid. Respondents did, occasionally, identify professors who solicited bribes, but not with detail sufficient enough to cause someone to be arrested. As a result, Dalga's survey produced numerous leads, but insufficient evidence, and Dalga occasionally used these leads to confront teachers. Therefore, it is impossible to say that there was a routine price for a high grade in a history exam at a particular university, although there was enough evidence to suspect that certain teachers occasionally solicited bribes from their students.
  
  Unfortunately, Dalga was forced to play an investigative role that the government should have been playing, and, to date, has declined to play. Azerbaijan needs to move beyond stories based on unconfirmed facts, it needs to move beyond anecdotes, and towards a system involving the objective collection of evidence and the prosecution of particular cases. This can only be done by aggressive law enforcement agencies, which exist in Azerbaijan, but are currently not interested in pursuing routine bribe cases. As a high level prosecutor in Azerbaijan once told me, in sum, if you stop people from taking bribes, they will commit burglaries. This cynicism is reflected in the low number of cases that the Prosecutor General's anti-corruption unit has brought since its inception a few years ago. In the absense of real evidence, Azerbaijanis are left with ""war stories"" and apathy, because if ""everyone takes bribes,"" why stop paying bribes? If ""all judges are corrupt,"" why sue somebody if the defendant is going to win by paying a bribe? If ""all of the professors at Baku State University take bribes,"" why study? These perceptions not only wrongfully taint the reputations of the judges and professors who refuse to take bribes, but they make it appear that the corruption problem is insurmountable. It is not. Rigorous data collection by non-governmental organizations and aggressive law enforcement by the government are the key. Because if the problem is that ""every judge takes bribes,"" then every lawyer and litigant pays bribes. This is not the case Furthermore, if the problem is that ""every professor at Baku State University is corrupt,"" then every student, as well as their parents are corrupt. This is also not the case. The vast majority of Azerbaijanis are honest, hard working people, who want an honest, hard working government, just like any other society. They do not want to pay bribes, and they need support from their government to break out of the cycle of bribery. Additionally, the vast majority of Azerbaijani government officials are honest, hard working people who do not wish to be tainted by the misconduct of others, and they need support, as well. This support can come from either a renewed interest by the Prosecutor General's Office to combat corruption, or from the creation of a new independent anti-corruption law enforcement agency.
  
  (It should be noted that the essay incorrectly describes the Anti-Corruption Commision as a law enforcement agency, and wrongfully credits it with the prosecution of the former Minister of Economic Affairs. This case was made by the Ministry of National Security, the successor agency to the K.G.B.)
  
  The essay correctly identifies two other issues that contribute to the corruption problem in Azerbaijan, specifically, widespread poverty and the lack of a true separation of powers. With respect to the latter, the President has the power to appoint and remove all judges, and there is no independent judiciary. Without an independent judiciary, there can be no judicial review, and the rule of law must bow to the whims of the Executive Branch.
  
  With respect to the economy, the government recognizes that low government salaries are a cause of corruption. In the Fall of 2005, the government raised the salaries of the traffic police in order to stem the tide of incidents of bribe soliciation. In the Spring of 2006, the Minister of Education informed me that he was proposing an increase in the salaries of university professors and teachers, for the same purpose. Azerbaijan's economy is in transition, due primarily to the new oil wealth brought by the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which has begun to deliver Caspian Sea oil to the West. For the past few years, Azerbaijan has had one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and it is not yet clear how this will affect the corruptio probelm. The new economy appears to have had an impact on the average person, which the casual observer may see on the streets of Baku. During my tenure in Azerbaijan, which ended in June 2006, I observed an influx in new automobiles in Baku, which caused such traffic problems that the city center began to resemble Midtown Manhattan at rush hour. Standing on the balcony of a rooftop restaurant in Fountain Square, one can count about twenty new high rise apartment buildings that are under construction. New expensive restaurants have been opening in Fountain Square, and the patrons not only include the expatriate community, but Bakuvians, as well. At the same time, I observed an increase in beggars in Fountain Square, many from the regions outside of Baku, and their number included many gamins, small children who accost adults for food and money. How this new economy will affect the level of bribery --whether it reduces the number of bribe incidents, or merely increases the price-- remains to be seen."