18 Sep 14 | Armenia, Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan News, News and features, Turkey
On 5 September, Azerbaijaini president Ilham Aliyev addressed the Nato summit at the Celtic Manor golf resort in Newport, Wales.
It was an unspectacular speech from an unspectacular autocrat. As he often does, he talked about the amount of money Azerbaijan was spending abroad, Azerbaijan’s rapid economic development, Azerbaijan’s role as a bridge between east and west, and Azerbaijan’s continuing dispute with Armenia.
The dispute between the two countries over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has gone on pretty much since the break-up of the Soviet Union, flared as recently as this summer, when fourteen Azerbaijani troops were killed in clashes with their Armenian counterparts. It was easy to miss this, considering events in other parts of the former Soviet Union. As seems usual in international conflict now, neither side made any gain and both sides claimed victory.
A few weeks after that skirmish, and just before his Nato address, Aliyev met recently-elected president (formerly prime minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Aliyev is keen to build an alliance with Turkey, and clearly sees common cause in a shared dislike of Armenia. After the meeting, the Azerbaijani leader tweeted that “Turkey has always pursued an open policy on the issue of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, has always stood by Azerbaijan, stood by truth, justice and international law.” He went on:
This was interesting, in that Erdogan did not seem to mention any discussion of the Armenian genocide in his press briefing after the meeting. In fact, the Turkish president has been perceived as attempting to soften the Turkish state’s hardline denial of the incidents of 1915, when one million Armenians suffered deportation and death at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey.
In April, on the 99th anniversary of the beginning of the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Erdogan released a statement saying: “Millions of people of all religions and ethnicities lost their lives in the first world war. Having experienced events which had inhumane consequences – such as relocation – during the first world war should not prevent Turks and Armenians from establishing compassion and mutually humane attitudes towards one another.”
The Justice and Development (AK) party leader went on to express condolences to the descendants of people who had died “in the context of the early 20th century”.
Now, this isn’t quite an apology; it’s barely even an apology at upset caused. It’s closer to the “mistakes were made” formulation, which is designed not so much to pass the buck as fire the buck into the heart of the sun in the hope that no one will ever have to deal with it again, particularly not the person whose buck it is in the first place.
But in the context of Turkey, where not long ago talking about the Armenian genocide could get you killed, it’s as good as you’re going to get for now.
So why would Aliyev raise the genocide issue this month? Perhaps he is nervous that Turkey, a major ally in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, is going soft on Armenia. This year’s detente between Turkey and Armenia continued when Armenia’s foreign minister Eduard Nalbandian attended Erdogan’s presidential inauguration at the end of August.
Nalbandian, in return, formally offered Erdogan an invitation to Armenia’s genocide commemorations next year, repeating an invitation first extended a few months ago by the country’s president Serzh Sargsyan. Any newfound good relations between Armenia and Turkey would severely weaken Azerbaijan’s territorial argument, or more accurately, weaken its ability to make the argument forcefully in the international arena. Turkey’s dispute with Armenia, after all, is mainly historic, and Erdogan, having seemingly consolidated his own power base outside of both the secular “deep state” and the Islamic Gülen movement to which many assumed he owed his success, now has a free hand on shaping foreign policy. Azerbaijan’s dispute with Armenia is current and, Aliyev hopes, immediate.
And so Azerbaijan has chosen to try to reignite the issue for its own ends. Meanwhile, in his own country, human rights abuses continue, with reports last week that Leyla Yunus, Director of the Institute for Peace and Democracy, was in ill health after prison beatings.
In spite of all this, Azerbaijan will continue to attempt to buy respectability. Next June, Baku will hold the first “European Games”, backed by the European Olympic Committee, featuring such irrelevancies as three-a-side basketball and beach soccer. It is not exactly the real thing, but then, post-Soviet Azerbaijan is a country built of facades; facades of modernity and wealth and progress and “democracy”. Facades that hide an underlying ugliness.
This article was posted on Thursday 18 Sept 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
05 Sep 14 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan News, News and features
Seymur Hezi, a reporter working for Azadliq, Azerbaijan’s last independent newspaper, was sentenced to a two month pretrial detention on Monday, charged with disorderly conduct. This morning, journalist Khadija Ismayilova was detained at the Baku airport, according to the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS).
Hezi’s arrest is another sign of the continuing clampdown by Azerbaijan’s authoritarian government on civil society. The journalist was charged with an alleged attack on a person in the street, although his lawyers claim he was trying to protect himself after he had been harassed and attacked.
It is not the first time charges of hooliganism and disorderly conduct have been applied against opposition politicians, civil society activists and journalists in Azerbaijan. In previous years, the same charges were used to imprison critical journalists Sardar Alibeili and Ganimat Zahid as well as bloggers Emin Milli and Adnan Hajizadeh.
“Seymur Hezi’s arrest is a serious blow against our newspaper. He is one of the brightest Azerbaijani analysts and journalists, and a true intellectual,” Rahim Haciyev, acting editor of Azadliq newspaper, told Index.
Haciyev said he is sure Hezi’s arrest is the result of a planned provocation and the journalist is prosecuted for publishing critical articles on the authorities in the newspaper, as well as in his online TV program “Azerbaijani Hour”, which he scripts and hosts.
The journalist’s arrest came only a month after the newspaper he works for, Azadliq, was forced into suspension of publication due to financial pressure from the authorities. Now it exists only in its online version.
The authorities of Azerbaijan continue their clampdown on the civil society of the country. Well-know human rights defenders Rasul Jafarov, Intigam Aliyev, Leyla Yunus and her husband Arif Yunus are still behind bars after they were all sentenced to 3 months of pretrial detention. The office of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS) was searched and sealed.
This wave of repression is connected to new legislation in place in Azerbaijan that restricts the freedom of association. In fact the new law makes it illegal for unregistered civil society organisations to receive funds for their activities.
This article was posted on 5 Sept 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
13 Aug 14 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan Letters, Campaigns, Statements
Mr Thorbjørn Jagland
Secretary General of the Council of Europe
67075 Strasbourg Cedex
France
Fax: +33 3 88 41 27 99
Email: [email protected]
13 August 2014
Re: Wave of repression in Azerbaijan
Dear Secretary General,
We are writing to you to express our concern and disappointment with your 11 August 2014 public statement, following your agreement with President Ilham Aliyev that a joint Committee between the Presidential Administration and representatives of the civil society, established in 2005, would be re-convened. You called this initiative “a good opportunity to go through the charges brought against the human rights defenders and to re-launch dialogue between the authorities and civil society.”
This announcement comes in the midst of an “unprecedented repression against civil society leaders in Azerbaijan.”[1]
Just in the last days many indispensible voices were indeed arrested in an attempt to silence them: a well-known and widely respected human rights defender Rasul Jafarov[2]; human rights defenders Leyla Yunus, a Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour as a tribute for her longstanding work promoting human rights; and human rights lawyer Intigam Aliyev, “a man who many refer to as ‘müəllim’, or ‘teacher’ – an honorific that in Azerbaijan bestows the utmost respect, who […] taught, educated, trained, and provided guidance to Azerbaijan’s newest generation of human rights defenders.”[3] Intigam Aliyev is also engaged as a regional tutor in the Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) programme of the Council of Europe.
This new wave of repression comes after the sentencing on 26 May of Anar Mammadli and Bashir Suleymanli to respectively 5 years and 6 months and 3 years and 6 months imprisonment. Those two human rights defenders are the leaders of the only independent group monitoring elections in Azerbaijan. At the same time, 8 activists of NIDA, a non-governmental youth movement, were convicted on charges of hooliganism, possessing drugs and explosives as well as intent to cause public disorder. On Friday, 4 July, another NIDA activist, Ömar Mammadov was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment on charges of drug possession with the aim of selling it.
We are disappointed that you have abstained from any public comment on the charges against the human rights defenders. The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights considers the charges against Rasul Jafarov and the travel ban against Emin Huseynov as “another disturbing illustration of how human rights defenders in Azerbaijan are systematically threatened with an instrumental use of criminal suits.”[4] In her statement issued on 3 August 2014,[5] the rapporteur on human rights defenders of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Mailis Reps denounced Leyla Yunus’ arrest and detention and expressed “concern for the true motivation underlying the charges levied against her,” calling the arrest “another example of the unrelenting suppression of independent voices and crackdown on civil society in the country. This is an unacceptable violation of Azerbaijan’s duties as a member of the Council of Europe.”
We are surprised that you did not publicly call for the release of the detained human rights defenders, at least from the pre-trial detention, which is not necessary[6] and presents a risk to the heath condition of Leyla Yunus. Intigam Aliyev and Arif Yunus also have problematic health conditions.
It is unclear to us which committee you refer to, and we understand it is in fact a working group established in 2005 on political prisoners in the country. The people, who have been over the last years working on the issue of political prisoners in the country and on core human rights issues, are now behind bars or left the country for security reasons. The civil society in Azerbaijan has grown in size and developed in professionalism in the last decade, and now includes strong voices for the promotion of human rights, such as the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS), which was sealed whilst you spoke with President Aliyev on 11 August.[7] Who will today choose the representatives of Azerbaijani civil society in that working group?
To launch a dialogue platform in these conditions and without first step by the government, meaning the unconditional and immediate release of human rights defenders, will at best be ephemeral, and might possibly be counterproductive. How will this group operate without the key professional and defenders who are now jailed or detained? There is no need to “go through the charges brought against the human rights defenders”; they just need to be dropped because they are unfounded and unfair, and indeed based on laws, which de facto criminalise the work of human rights defenders. As Secretary General, you indeed give the impression that you endorse policies by which governments can choose their civil society, fostering it with support for loyal voices and repression for critical voices, contrary to the values embodied by the Council of Europe.
Those persecuted and arrested human rights defenders in Azerbaijan are also the ones, which inform and cooperate with institutions of the Council of Europe, including yourself. They have international recognition and wide outreach. In June 2014, when President Aliyev addressed the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Emin Huseynov, Rasul Jafarov and Intigam Aliyev together organised a side-event in Strasbourg, critical of the Azerbaijani human rights record. This wave of repression is related to Azerbaijan’s chairmanship of the Council of Europe and indeed a reprisal against critical voices cooperating with and reporting to the Council of Europe mechanisms.
This reprisal did not start recently but started with the order to the Human Rights House Azerbaijan to cease its activities in March 2011, following an event organised by HRH Azerbaijan at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in January 2011.[8]
We believe that your role is to protect and defend Council of Europe institutions, including those cooperating with them. We therefore regret that you have not chosen to use your influence and the power of your office to call for immediate and unconditional release of those human rights defenders and have not condemned their arrest.
As said by the Commissioner in the statement quoted above “by stifling dissent, Azerbaijan is failing to comply with its international obligations which require safeguarding freedom of expression, assembly and association. It is necessary that Azerbaijan reverse the situation. A first step would be to free all those detained because of the views they expressed.”
Sincerely,
Jodie Ginsburg Florian Irminger Adela Pospichalovaon
Index on Censorship Human Rights House Foundation People in Need
For correspondence:
Florian Irminger
Head of Advocacy and HRHF’s Geneva Office
Human Rights House Foundation (HRHF)
Rue de Varembé 1, PO Box 35
1211 Geneva 20
Tel: +41 22 33 22 552
Fax: +41 22 33 22 559
Email: [email protected]
[1] Human Rights House Foundation’s press release of 9 August 2014, available at http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/20335.html.
[2] More information on that case available at http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/20306.html.
[3]Article about Intigam Aliyev’s arrest by Giorgi Gogia, Senior Researcher at Human Rights Watch, available at http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/08/08/dispatches-azerbaijan-jails-yet-another-rights-defender.
[4] Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights statement of 7 August 2014, available at http://tinyurl.com/qh6snqc.
[5] Mailis Reps’ statement is available at http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/News/News-View-EN.asp?newsid=5153&lang=2&cat=5.
[6] Human rights defenders have been facing travel bans and hence, cannot leave the country, despite the fact that they do not present any risk to society if not detained. Conditions making a pre-trial detention necessary are hence not fulfilled, abiding by article 5 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
[7] The visible persecution of IRFS and its leader began on 8 August with a search of its offices. More information available at http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/08/azerbaijan-press-freedom-arrest-free-expression-baku/.
[8] More information on the situation of the Human Rights House Azerbaijan available at http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/20037.html.
08 Aug 14 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan News, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
(Image: IRFS)
The offices of Azerbaijani press freedom organisation Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS) were on Friday searched by police – the latest in a new clampdown by authorities on human rights groups in Azerbaijan. Human rights lawyer Intigam Aliyev also had his home searched, and has been sentenced to three months pretrial detention.
The IRSF offices were today surrounded by police officers according to reports from Azerbaijan. There are unconfirmed reports that Emin Huseynov, the head of the organisation, has been detained. He was already under a travel ban.
Over the past two weeks, human right defenders Leyla and Arif Yunus and Rasul Jafarov have been sentenced to three months of pretrial detention, facing charges including high treason, state betrayal and tax evasion. One of the country’s few remaining independent newspapers, Index Award winner Azadliq, has been forced to suspend publication due to financial troubles.
IRFS has been reporting on these and other instances of apparent state targeting of opposition voices. The NGO was founded in 2006, “in response to growing government restrictions on freedom of expression and freedom of press,” according to their mission statement. The latest global press freedom index from Reporters Without Borders ranks Azerbaijan at 160 out of 180 countries, and the recent estimates puts the number of political prisoners in the country at over 140.
The recent cases have taken place against a backdrop of heightening tensions between Azerbaijan and neighbouring Armenia, which so far has left at least 14 people dead. President Aliyev on Thursday published a series of tweets on his personal Twitter account which seemed to threaten war with Armenia. The troubled relationship between the two countries has also played a part in cases against dissidents, including Leyla Yunus who has been accused of spying for Armenia.
In May, Azerbaijan assumed chairmanship of the Council of Europe’s (COE) Committee of Ministers, whose tasks include “ensure[ing] that member states comply with the judgments and certain decisions of the European Court of Human Rights”.
In a statement on Friday, the COE said Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland has “revealed his deep concern at the arrest of Azerbaijan human rights defender Leyla Yunus and the prosecution case against her husband Arif”.
“By stifling dissent, Azerbaijan is failing to comply with its international obligations which require safeguarding freedom of expression, assembly and association. It is necessary that Azerbaijan reverse the situation,” COE Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muiznieks has told Azerbaijani media.
Index on Censorship, along with 60 other NGOs, has called for the immediate and unconditional release of Leyla and Arif Yunus and Rasul Jafarov. Today Index reiterates this call and raised its concerns with Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
“It is deeply worrying that while international attention is directed at conflicts elsewhere, Azerbaijan appears to be resuming oppression of dissent,” said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship. “This is a country showing blatant disregard for human rights while presiding over an institution that describes itself as the continent’s ‘leading human rights organisation.’ The fellow members of the Council of Europe must do more to show Azerbaijan its actions must cease immediately.”
This article was published on August 7, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
