AZERBAIJAN: CPJ DENOUNCES CONTINUED IMPRISONMENT OF JOURNALIST
Committee to Protect Journalists press release, New York
24 Aug 07
Text of press release by the New York-based Committee to Protect
Journalists (CPJ) on 24 August
New York, 24 August: The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces
the continued imprisonment of Eynulla Fatullayev, editor of the
now-shuttered Russian-language weekly Realny Azerbaijan and the
Azeri-language daily Gundalik Azarbaycan.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan upheld Fatullayev’s
30-month prison sentence on charges of defaming Azerbaijanis in
an article.
Fatullayev has been held in the Ministry of National Security
isolation ward since his 20 April conviction by the Yasamal District
Court in Baku. His family has been denied visitation rights, said
Uzeir Jafarov, editor after Fatullayev of Gundalik Azarbaycan and
Fatullayev’s trustee.
Neither Jafarov nor Fatullayev’s defense lawyer, Isakhan Ashurov, were
notified of Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing, Jafarov told CPJ. A
four-judge panel affirmed Fatullayev’s earlier verdict in the absence
of legal counsel and journalists. Fatullayev’s defense is preparing
an appeal to the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights,
Jafarov told CPJ.
"We are shocked by the continued politicized imprisonment of Eynulla
Fatullayev and the harassment of his staffers," CPJ Executive Director
Joel Simon said. "We call on Azerbaijani authorities to drop all
charges against Fatullayev, release him immediately, and allow his
two newspapers to resume work without fear of reprisal.
In addition to being imprisoned on a defamation indictment, Fatullayev
is being investigated on a vague charge of "terrorism," filed against
him by national security authorities in May. If convicted, the
embattled editor faces 12 additional years behind bars. In late May,
agents searched both Realny Azerbaijan’s and Gundalik Azarbaycan’s
offices for ties to terrorism, and confiscated all the papers’
21 computers, in effect paralyzing the newsrooms’ operations. The
newspapers’ staffers have been unemployed since, Jafarov told CPJ. The
ministry has interrogated at least five of the journalists, according
to local press reports.
Defamation charges against Fatullayev stemmed from an undated Internet
posting attributed to him, which he said he did not write. Tatyana
Chaladze, head of the Azeri Center for Protection of Refugees and
Displaced Persons, filed civil lawsuit in February and a criminal
complaint in April against Fatullayev. Chaladze cited the remark,
which said Azerbaijanis were responsible for the 1992 massacre of
ethnic Azeri residents of the Nagorno-Karabakh town of Khodjali,
according to local press reports.
Later, press reports said Fatullayev’s April conviction was actually
based on his 2005 article titled "Karabakhsky Dnevnik" ("Karabakh
Diary"), in which he wrote that Armenian forces had given an escape
corridor to Azeri civilians who would try to flee Khodjali. Fatullayev
had published the article in Realny Azerbaijan’s predecessor,
the opposition magazine Monitor, which folded after the 2 March
2005, contract-style murder of its editor, Elmar Huseynov. However,
Fatullayev was convicted because of the Internet comment attributed
to him, not because of this article.
The terror charge against Fatullayev comes from a commentary,
headlined "The Aliyevs Go to War," published earlier this year in
the Russian-language weekly Realny Azerbaijan and written by reporter
Rovshan Bagirov. The commentary focused on President Ilham Aliyev’s
foreign policy regarding Iran. It contained harsh, critical language
about the Azerbaijani government. Security officials did not elaborate
on the charges or explain how the piece amounted to terrorism. The
criminal investigation of Fatullayev on that charge is ongoing,
according to local press reports.
With seven behind bars, Azerbaijan is the leading jailer of journalists
in Europe and Central Asia. On 2 August CPJ expressed its concern
regarding Azerbaijan’s press freedom record at a U.S. Helsinki
Commission hearing on "Freedom of the Media in the OSCE Region."