We are writing to urge you to use your forthcoming meeting with President Ilham Aliev to reaffirm the importance of human rights in Azerbaijan.
The Azerbaijani government has made no significant progress on key human rights concerns, despite strong criticism in recent years from the United States, as well as from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe and numerous international and domestic nongovernmental organizations. We recognize the United States’ interest in ensuring stability in Azerbaijan and the cooperation of its government on important security concerns. But a key to Azerbaijan’s stability will undoubtedly be the development of rule of law and respect for human rights. In the continued absence of real progress in these areas, Azerbaijan risks opening itself to instability fueled by public discontent with government policies. And as the recent experience of Uzbekistan demonstrates, it will be hard for the United States to sustain a constructive relationship with Azerbaijan if repression continues.
More importantly, many in Azerbaijan will look to the U.S. government to take a principled stand on human rights in the face of a government that is so clearly violating these principles. For these reasons, we ask you to raise several key issues with President Aliev—elections, political prisoners, and torture.
Elections
International observers uniformly deemed the November 2005 elections in Azerbaijan to be neither free nor fair. The OSCE, for example, noted violations such as harassment of opposition supporters, intimidation of observers, tampering with election protocol results, and ballot-box stuffing. The government has investigated some election violations highlighted by the international community and organized rerun elections in 10 districts for May 13. But this in no way offsets the Azerbaijani government’s failure to address the broader fraud documented by international observers in Azerbaijan’s many other districts. Instead, following the elections, local government, police, and other officials threatened and harassed opposition and independent candidates, their supporters, and others who actively pursued complaints of falsification or other violations during the elections. The authorities have continued to limit freedom of assembly and, in one particularly egregious incident, brutally dispersed an opposition sponsored rally in Baku on November 26, 2005 without warning and arrested at least thirty of the peaceful protestors.
The human rights community of Azerbaijan, opposition political parties, and many others were profoundly disappointed by the U.S. government’s response to the November elections. These groups rely on the U.S. government’s public statements to support human rights and the rule of law in the face of encroachments by the Azerbaijani government, and to protect government critics from government repression. We ask that you publicly encourage President Aliev to implement the recommendations of the 2006 OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission Report and the Council of Europe in order to create an environment for free and fair elections in the rerun elections of May 13, 2006 and to establish the groundwork for legitimate future elections. We also hope that you will stress the importance of establishing election commissions that are not dominated by the ruling political party, one of the key recommendations of the OSCE report, as one of the principal means for ensuring fairness in elections.
Political prisoners
Azerbaijan has a long history of politically-motivated arrests and is continuing to use this and other tactics to silence critics or those perceived as threatening government authority. In advance of the elections, the government arrested dozens of high-profile politicians and businessmen on allegations of conspiring with exiled opposition leader Rasul Guliev to stage a coup in Azerbaijan. Those arrested include Economic Development Minister Farhad Aliev; Farhad Aliev’s brother, Rafiq Aliev, the chairman of Azpetrol, Azerbaijan’s main oil refiner; and Minister of Health Ali Insanov, as well as numerous lower level officials. We hope that you will express concern over these arrests and encourage Prsident Aliev to ensure that the accused receive full access to lawyers and fair and open trials for all of those arrested in the pre-election period for alleged crimes against the state.
In August and September 2005, the government arrested several senior members of the youth group, Yeni Fekir (New Thinking), including its leader, Ruslan Bashirli, and his deputies, Said Nuri and Ramin Tagiev, on charges of accepting funds from Armenia’s secret services to carry out a coup in Azerbaijan. On March 31, the three men went on trial, which the judge decided would be closed to media and observers, allegedly out of national security concerns and concerns for the safety of certain witnesses. Lawyers for the three men protested the closed trial, but were denied their motion. To protest the closed trial, the Yeni Fekir leaders have refused to be represented by their lawyers and have refused to answer any questions posed to them by the prosecution or the judge. Ruslan Bashirli and Ramin Tagiev have also gone on a hunger strike. We hope that you will express concern about the decision to hold a closed trial of the Yeni Fekir leaders, stressing the importance of upholding fair trial standards and generating public trust for the judicial system.
Police torture
Torture remains a widespread and largely unacknowledged problem in Azerbaijan. Human Rights Watch has documented this in several reports in past years, and one glaring case we researched in the past year, involving the torture of minors, illustrates the problem. On March 14, 2005, agents from a police precinct in Baku detained Ruslan Bessonov, age 16, Maksim Genashilkin, age 14, and Dmitri Pavlov, age 15. The teenagers are all from the village of Eni Genushli, near Baku. According to information obtained by Human Rights Watch through interviews with the boys’ relatives, police officials and officials from the local prosecutor’s office subjected all three boys to severe beatings and other serious abuse amounting to torture, including suffocation, denial of food, water and sleep, threats of additional and more severe violence, threats of rape, and threats against the boys’ family members. Lawyers were permitted access to the boys only two days after their arrest. Thus compelled under torture, the boys signed confessions and incriminating statements against one another for participation in a murder, which they all maintain none of them committed.
The boys all remain in pretrial detention in extremely poor conditions that violate international standards. We ask that you stress that such treatment of minors is abhorrent and press for a thorough investigation. We also count on you to make the broader point that torture in all circumstances of detainees is illegal and immoral and impedes the state’s ability to guarantee stability and the rule of law.
We hope you will raise these important issues during your meetings with President Aliev and other top Azerbaijani leaders. President Aliev’s visit to the United States will be the focus of widespread attention. There will be a particular interest in seeing the U.S. apply its human rights policies consistently. For this reason, we believe that while the issues that you discuss in private with Mr. Aliev are important, your public statements will be crucial to confirming the U.S. government’s commitment to human rights in Azerbaijan.
We thank you for your attention to the concerns in this letter.
Sincerely,
Holly Cartner
Executive Director
Europe and Central Asia division
Tom Malinowski
Washington Advocacy Director
