24 Nov 14 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan News, Azerbaijan Statements, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muižnieks (Photo: Council of Europe)
I recently returned from one of the most difficult missions of my two-and-a-half year tenure as Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. In late October I was in Azerbaijan, the oil-rich country in the South Caucasus, which just finished holding the rotating chairmanship of the 47-member Council of Europe. Most countries chairing the organisation, which prides itself as the continent’s guardian of human rights, democracy and the rule of law, use their time at the helm to tout their democratic credentials. Azerbaijan will go down in history as the country that carried out an unprecedented crackdown on human rights defenders during its chairmanship.
All of my partners in Azerbaijan are in jail. It was heart-wrenching to visit Leyla Yunus in pre-trial detention outside of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. Head of the Institute for Peace and Democracy, Leyla is Azerbaijan’s most prominent human rights activist and one of three finalists for this year’s prestigious Sakharov award, granted by the European Parliament. I do not know whether it was due to her cataracts or her emotional distress, but she cried throughout our half-hour meeting. The 58-year-old also has diabetes, Hepatitis C and kidney problems. She was in particular anguish for not having had the chance to see Arif, her husband of 26 years, for more than three months. He is also in pre-trial detention, despite having had a stroke just prior to his arrest.
The Yunus couple are among the brave activists in the region that have sought to promote dialogue with their counterparts in Armenia, a country with which Azerbaijan has been at war for the last 25 years over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which was violently wrested from Azerbaijan as the Soviet Union collapsed. Arif and Leyla Yunus have both been charged with the crime of treason. Leyla regularly compiled lists of the country’s political prisoners for submission to international organisations. On October 24, the day I left Azerbaijan, a Baku court prolonged Leyla’s pre-trial detention for another four months.
Another difficult meeting was with Intigam Aliyev, one of Azerbaijan’s most renowned human rights lawyers, who is also in pre-trial detention for allegedly violating the restrictive provisions that make human rights work virtually impossible in the country. Until his arrest three months ago, Intigam was the co-ordinator of the Council of Europe’s legal training programme in the country. He was also legal counsel for dozens of cases against Azerbaijan before the European Court of Human Rights. When the authorities seized all of his documents, including the case files, he said he felt like the rug had been pulled from under his feet. He did not know how he could continue pushing the cases at the European Court or how he could defend himself. Again, the day I left Azerbaijan, his pre-trial detention was prolonged for another three months. When the judge announced his decision, Intigam nearly fainted.
I had a more upbeat meeting with Anar Mammadli, winner of this year’s Vaclav Havel prize, granted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Anar has already been convicted to a five-and-a-half-year prison sentence for violating the country’s cumbersome NGO laws (the formal charges were tax evasion, illegal entrepreneurship and abuse of authority). Anar was appealing his conviction and was in good spirits, despite the scant chances of success of his appeal. As one of the country’s most professional organisers of election monitoring, Anar had been harshly critical of several previous ballots in the country. Anar spends most of his time exercising and reading books on political science, philosophy and history. He wanted to know how from prison he could provide input to the Council of Europe’s efforts to assist Azerbaijan improve the legal framework for NGOs.
I also left heartened by a meeting with Rasul Jafarov, the head of an NGO called the Human Rights Club. Though he had had his pre-trial detention extended for another three months the day before I met him, Rasul was in good spirits. Rasul made a name for himself by organising a campaign called “Sing for Democracy” in the run-up to the holding of the Eurovision Song contest, which Azerbaijan hosted in 2012. He had planned to organise a new campaign called “Sports for Democracy” in the run-up to the holding of the European Games in Azerbaijan in 2015. Though he is charged with violations of the NGO law, as we bid farewell to each other, he related his plans to organise a human rights NGO among detainees.
While most of my partners are in detention, others discontinued their human rights work, left the country over the summer, or went into hiding as the crackdown spread. I visited one of the activists in hiding, Emin Huseynov, head of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety, an NGO defending journalists in Azerbaijan’s restrictive media context. Though Emin is only 35 years old, he has very high blood pressure and an old spinal injury caused by an encounter with Azerbaijani police batons at an “unauthorised” demonstration a few years ago. Doctors who have examined him say he will not survive an Azerbaijani prison.
These are just some of the activists and journalists languishing in prison or under pressure in Azerbaijan. They are core partners for the Council of Europe – they have all attended roundtables for human rights defenders organised by my office or participated in events organised by the Parliamentary Assembly. The Council of Europe’s primary friends and partners in the country have almost all been targeted. While this pains me deeply, it also makes practical cooperation between Azerbaijan and the Council of Europe extremely difficult. The reprisals must stop. Now.
This article was originally posted on the Facebook page of the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. It is republished here with permission from the Council of Europe and the Council of Europe Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights.
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
26 Jun 14 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan News, News and features
The Baku Court of Grave Crimes announced the verdict for the NIDA movement activists in May 2014. The human rights defenders Rashadat Akhundov, Zaur Gurbanly and Ilkin Rustamzadeh to 8 years’ imprisonment, Rashad Hasanov and Mamed Azizov – to 7.5 years. Protesters were detained and victimised by police. (Photo: Aziz Karimov / Demotix)
In a bleakly comic turn at the beginning of Ilham Aliyev’s address to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe this week, Assembly president Anne Brasseur asked press photographers to leave the chamber and reminded those present that they were not permitted to vocalise their approval or disapproval during the Azerbaijani dictator’s stand. It appeared that Brasseur hadn’t quite meant what she said, as in the end photographers at the front of the room were merely required to move their tripods to ensure everyone in the room could see Aliyev as he spoke.
Aliyev’s speech was given to mark the Azerbaijan’s taking up of the chair of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers last month. And what a speech it was!
The man who promises to “turn initiatives into reality” (still no idea) told of Azerbaijan’s enormous progress in all fields, not just oil fields. He spoke of the country’s “very positive atmosphere” and listed the country’s great freedoms: freedom of political activity, freedom of expression, freedom of media… Azerbaijan was proud of these freedoms, he said. Azerbaijan knew that an uncensored internet and independent newspapers were important for democracy.
It was a lovely speech, and also one that contained barely a word of truth beyond the conjunctions. Aliyev may as well have praised the nation’s Quidditch team for defeating Ravenclaw on penalties at the World Cup. He could have told us about his new motorcar, and his adventures with Ratty, Mole and Badger, and been more believable.
Watching Aliyev, the only time one got the sense he even believed what he was saying himself was when discussing the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, and even then he was only drily insisting that the regions “geographical toponyms” (place names?) were Azeri in origin: All Your Geographical Toponyms Are Belong To Us, so to speak.
The truth about Azerbaijan is quite different from the picture painted by its president this week. As Human Rights Watch pointed out ahead of the Council of Europe speech, “In the past two years, Azerbaijani authorities have brought or threatened unfounded criminal charges against at least 40 political activists, journalists, bloggers, and human rights defenders, most of whom are behind bars.” Search for Azerbaijan stories on Index, and you will find more details of those arrests and abuses.
And this isn’t exactly obscure knowledge. People know three things about Azerbaijan: it has a lot of gas and oil; it takes Eurovision very seriously; and it has a poor human rights record. After his speech, Aliyev was confronted by Michael McNamara of the CoE socialist group, who quoted Amnesty’s statistic that there are currently 19 political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Not so, said Aliyev. There are no political prisoners in Azerbaijan. The people who came up with these statistics were lying. There was a programme of “deliberate provocation” against Azerbaijan — though it was unspecified who was leading this programme.
Aliyev swore that this plot to undermine Azerbaijan would fail.
The Azerbaijani president is not alone in his capability for bare-faced falsehood. It’s a specific strain of Soviet and post-Soviet behaviour, learned from the Communist Party and the KGB. If the leader says something, it is true, no matter what the evidence to the contrary. There are no political prisoners in Azerbaijan, says Aliyev, and we encourage a free media because it is important to our democracy; Ukraine has been taken over by fascists, says Vladimir Putin, and Russia has no choice but to fight them. There is no point in putting on a play about depression in Belarus, an Alexander Lukashenko apparatchik tells the Belarus Free Theatre, because there is no such thing as depression in Belarus.
“So what?” you may say. “Politicians and institutions lie.” And you’d be right. But this is a form of lying that goes far beyond “I was perfectly within my rights to claim those expenses”/”I did not have sex with that woman”. Political lies in functioning democracies tend to have to do with cover ups of personal or institutional failings. In an authoritarian society, with power utterly concentrated to the leader and his cadre, there is no such thing as an isolated failure. As a result, every aspect of life must be spun. All triumphs belong to the leader, all criticisms are propaganda, all failures sabotage. When there is no balance of power, is there really an objective truth? When, for example, the dictator Lukashenko told a journalist that journalist Irina Khalip, under house arrest, could leave Belarus any time she wanted, was that actually true? Was it true the moment he said it? Did it become true after he said it? And did it remain true?
This state of things raises a question for those of us seeking to better the lot of people living under regimes such as Belarus and Azerbaijan: can we pounce on the moments when autocrats declare as fact something we know to be untrue, cling on until they actually make it true? Or does this merely confirm the idea that truth is whatever their whim makes it?
This article was posted on June 26, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
08 May 14 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan News, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
This week eight young Azerbaijani activists were sentenced to between six and eight years in jail. The members of the N!DA Youth Movement, which works for democracy and social change, were convicted for possession of drugs and explosives, and for intending to “cause public disorder”. The charges are widely believed to be trumped up, and the trials have been criticised by foreign observers over “irregularities” and “shortcomings”, including inconsistencies in testimonies and mishandling of evidence.
This is just the latest addition to a long list of human rights abuses by authorities in the oil rich country. As the repression has largely been allowed to take place away from international attention, this is a good moment to remember a few things about Azerbaijan, especially as the country prepares to take over a six month chairmanship of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers.
1) The six are far from the only political prisoners in Azerbaijan
(Image: Aziz Karimov)
According to the latest figures, there are 142 political prisoners in Azerbaijan today. These include human rights defenders, youth activists, and a large number of religious activists, among others. There are currently 17 people serving life sentences. Ahead of the country’s presidential election last October, candidate Ilgar Mammadov was arrested. In March, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for “organizing mass disturbances” and “resisting the police”. Meanwhile, President Ilham Aliyev insists that there are no political prisoners in Azerbaijan.
2) You may escape imprisonment, but you could still face violence and intimidation
(Image: Aziz Karimov)
Attacks, threats and intimidation are regular occurrences for political opponents, activists and press in Azerbaijan. Following protests in the capital Baku as Aliyev secured his third consecutive term in power last October, demonstrators were beaten and detained by police. Police also raided the offices of independent Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Centre (EMDSC) which reported irregularities in the election. In 2012, reporter Idrak Abbasov was brutally beaten when filming the demolition of a house by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, allegedly by employees of the company and police. The same year, fellow journalist Khadija Ismayilova, known for covering corruption among the country’s powerful elite, was blackmailed with intimate images of her and her boyfriend. She continues to face intimidation today. These abuses are often allowed to happen with impunity.
3) Independent and critical media are under threat
(Image: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
Azerbaijan’s critical press have long been subjected to an array of attacks. Independent news outlets face economic sanctions, and are often barred from distribution networks. Some 70% of distribution is controlled by the government. Most of the nine national TV channels are either directly owned by the state or controlled by the authorities. Journalists also fall victim to legal threats. In the first six months of 2013, 36 defamation suits were brought against media outlets or journalists, four of which were criminal defamation suits. One victim of this hugely restrictive media environment is leading independent paper and Index Award winner Azadliq. The paper has been hit with £52,000 worth of fines following defamation suits, state-owned press distribution company Gasid has not been transferring payments that reflect the paper’s sales. Azadliq claims Gasid owe them some £44,000.
4) Authorities are on an ongoing PR mission
(Image: Zeljko Joksimovic/Wikimedia Commons)
While the situation inside the country shifts between bad and worse, authorities have focused their attentions on a wide-reaching international PR campaign. Ahead of hosting the Eurovision Song Contest, authorities ordered urban renewal that saw houses demolished and families evicted. Vast sums have in recent years been poured into the radical regeneration and beautification of Baku, and there’s more to come. There is also the posh London bar Baku, owned by the Aliyevs; the glossy, internationally distributed Baku magazine, edited by first daughter Leyla and co-published by Conde Nast; and the sponsorship deal with Champions League finalists Atlético Madrid. Next year, Baku will again play host to a prestigious international event — the inaugural European Games.
5) They are about to take charge of one of Europe’s most important human rights bodies
(Image: Sandro Weltin/Council of Europe)
“The Committee of Ministers supervises the execution of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights the Council of Europe…The Committee of Ministers’ essential function is to ensure that member states comply with the judgments and certain decisions of the European Court of Human Rights,” the Council of Europe declare on their website. Next week Azerbaijan will assume the chairmanship of this very Committee of Ministers. But one could say that COE is only sticking to form in its relationship with the country. Only last year, a majority in its Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) voted down a resolution on the existence of political prisoners in Azerbaijan.
This article was originally published on 8 May 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
