On the eve of the Novruz holiday in Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev today signed a decree pardoning more than 100 prisoners, among them two activists imprisoned on politically motivated charges. This is incredibly happy news for all of those pardoned and their families, but there is little else to celebrate.
Bashir Suleymanli and Orkhan Ayyubzade, the activists, never should have been imprisoned in the first place. Suleymanli was serving three-and-a-half years, following efforts by the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Center, where he was the deputy director, to investigate and reveal election fraud. The director, Anar Mammadli, remains in prison, despite calls from UN experts to release him. Both were convicted for bogus tax evasion and related offenses.
Police detained Ayyubzade, a youth activist, last May for attending an unsanctioned protest in Baku. Ayyubzade was sentenced to 20 days for a misdemeanor, but before he was released, the authorities charged him with resisting police, a criminal offense. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
And the revolving prison door in Azerbaijan just spun again. Yesterday, Siraj Kerimli, an activist with the Musavat opposition political party, was sentenced to six years on trumped-up drug charges.
Dozens more are behind bars, like leading human rights activist Leyla Yunus, the top investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, the human rights lawyer Intigam Aliyev, and the youth activist Rasul Jafarov, who planned a Sport for Rights campaign ahead of the June 2015 European Games in Baku.
We’d been hearing rumors of the pardons, mostly in response to calls for key interlocutors in the EU and elsewhere, to press Azerbaijan to release all of those imprisoned or awaiting trial on politically motivated charges. We had been told repeatedly that since there were likely to be pardons soon, they weren’t going to speak out about prisoners just yet.
Now that the pardons have been issued, while excellent news for those to be released, it’s clear that they signal no fundamental change in the government’s campaign to lock up and silence independent critical voices. The EU, US, the European Olympic Committees, and other key partners of Azerbaijan should urgently press the authorities to immediately and unconditionally free everyone still behind bars on bogus charges.
