Compatriot Party

The Compatriot Party (Yurddaş Partiyası) is a political party in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

Azerbaijan

At the last elections (November 5, 2000 and January 7, 2001), the party won 1 out of 125 seats.

According to the CIA, the current leader of the party is Mais Safarli.

Kazakhstan

The Compatriot Party advocates Kazakhstan’s integration with Russia, and has been refused re-registration three times since January 2003 on the grounds of minor irregularities in membership signature lists and technical errors in the party’s statute. 87 The Ministry of Justice said that 250 of the party’s 59,000 membership signatures were of minors. This still left the party well beyond the 50,000 threshold. In 2003 they were also denied registration for the 2004 parliamentary elections for alleged violatation of Article 7 of the law on political parties, which prohibits ethnic, religious, or gender-based parties. Given the weakness of these pretexts, party chairman Gennadii Beliakov ascribed the rejection to the central government’s fears that the party would not be loyal to the president. He pointed out that: "…all the objections to our application are minor… [the government is] doing it deliberately to delay the registration process, it’s because we’re opposition, and because they don’t know whom we’ll support in the presidential elections, for now we support Nazarbaev, but maybe someone ‘cleaner’ will be required." As of March 2004 the party remained unregistered.

References

• https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/aj.html
• http://hrw.org/reports/2004/kazakhstan0404/5.htm