Are Azerbaijani citizens allowed to criticize their government? Ioannisyan at the OSCE

On October 7, 2025, within the framework of the OSCE/ODIHR Human Dimension Conference in Warsaw, Daniel Ioannisyan, Program Coordinator of the “Union of Informed Citizens” NGO, delivered a speech, addressing the role of civil society and the level of democracy in Armenia.

In his speech, Ioannisyan presented both the problems existing in the electoral processes in Armenia and responded to the accusations made by Azerbaijan, emphasizing that Armenian civil society, unlike Azerbaijani one, operates in conditions of freedom and accountability.

The text of Daniel Ioannisyan’s speech is below.

“Madame moderator,

Initially, I was planning to talk about election-related problems in Armenia. We have Russia that is trying to interfere in our elections, just like they did in Moldova. We have an Electoral administration that is failing with oversight of money in politics.

We have a government that refused to adopt money in politics related legislation, that was drafted by CSOs. At the end, we have a ruling party that has abused administrative resources during a number of local elections without any serious prosecution followed.

But because the distinguished representatives of Azerbaijan in their copy-pasted speeches have called us GONGOs, I would like to talk about NGO’s as an important component of democratic society.

Civil society organizations in Armenia, including the one I am presenting here, are far not happy with the level of democracy in the country. But we are fully able to criticize our government. No one will prosecute us for that, no one will think of arresting us for that, no one will label us as “foreign agents” for that.

We are able to criticize our government here, we are able to criticize them in our country, we can do that on Armenian public television and we are able to ask any questions to our government and demand for answers in many formats.

And we do so. We strongly criticize our government for a number of issues, we do journalistic investigations revealing cases of corruption in our country. And for those efforts my organisation received Democracy Defender Award from a big number of member-state delegations to OSCE.

Our organisation has a number of court cases with the government. We have lodged an application against Armenia at the ECHR. We are doing investigations that lead to resignations, policy changes and even blocks candidates to leaders of law-enforcement agencies.

So, please, anyone from Azerbaijan, who calls GONGO, please, tell us, have you ever criticized your government to the level of 1% of us criticizing ours? We have a session on democratic institutions. Please, talk about democracy in your country.

You are coming from one of the most non-democtaric countries in the region. A country, where any non-government oriented NGO is prosecuted by the state, just like Russia or Belarus. And now, during this session on democracy, you are talking about everything except the absence of democracy in Azerbaijan.

Are there elections in Azerbaijan? Is there free media in Azerbaijan? Are Azerbaijani citizens allowed to criticize their government? Come on, answer these questions before calling us GONGOs.

Thank you”!