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Azerbaijani human rights defenders Leyla Yunus and her husband, Arif, have been held for nearly a year in pretrial detention on trumped-up charges. Ms. Yunus, 59, a prominent human rights activist, and her husband, 60, a historian, have been accused of tax evasion and treason. Both suffer from serious health problems that have gone untreated during their ordeal, The Washington Post  rites.

In Baku this week, their first trial began, on the tax evasion charges. On Monday, Mr. Yunus, who suffers from cardiovascular disease, lost consciousness in the courtroom. He was treated but his symptoms persisted, and on subsequent days, he could hardly sit up. Ms. Yunus suffers from diabetes and other maladies. At the end of the week, the public prosecutor, Farid Naghiyev, demanded 11 years in prison for Ms. Yunus and nine years for her husband.

The trial is a travesty of justice and exposes the true intent of the prosecution — to silence these courageous voices. President Ilham Aliyev has locked up about 100 political prisoners, including the gutsy investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, The Washington Post points.

Emin Milli, who spent 16 months in Mr. Aliyev’s prisons and went on to found Meydan TV, an independent online media platform in Berlin that publishes reports critical of the regime, told The Washington Post that the Azerbaijani authorities recently arrested his brother-in-law and made “absurd and bogus accusations” of narcotics trafficking. “All this pressure had one purpose,” Mr. Milli says, “to silence me personally and to silence Meydan TV . . . [a] small island of truth in the ocean of lies, repression and fear.”

The newspaper highlights that Mr. Aliyev behaves as if free speech and human rights are a trifle. “But it is also worth asking: Who outside of Azerbaijan encourages such impunity? Who helps Mr. Aliyev get away with this? In the West, there ought to be more concern for Azerbaijan’s political prisoners among the Europeans who blithely participated in the June athletic games without so much as a glance outside the arena, and from the U.S. Congress members and staff who in 2013 made an expense-paid junket to Baku and were showered with gifts,” the editorial board of The Washington Post stresses.

In 2014, Francois Hollande, the French President, met Leyla Yunus in Baku and awarded her with the Order of the Legion of Honor. Later, on 30 July, Yunus was arrested in the yard of her house. She was charged with high treason, tax evasion, illegal entrepreneurship, forgery and large-scale fraud. In January, media reported that the German doctor Christian Vitt confirmed that the arrested human rights defender suffered from a serious disease. However, in February 2015, Azerbaijani Nasimi District Court extended Leyla Yunus’ pretrial detention for five months. He husband, Arif Yunusov, also faces charges of high treason and large-scale fraud. In February 2015, Nasimi Court in Baku extended his pretrial detention to 5 August 2015.

In April 2015, Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Nils Muižnieks, published his written observations to the European Court on the case of Leyla and Arif Yunus. “The case of Leyla and Arif Yunus illustrates the pattern of repression that has emerged in Azerbaijan in recent years whereby human rights defenders are harassed through restrictive NGO legislation and selectively targeted with criminal prosecutions on charges that defy credibility,” the office of Commissioner declared.

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