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Bilasuvar district court in Azerbaijan sentenced Vekil Imanov, journalist Gunel Movlud’s brother, to a year in prison on charges of illicit drug trafficking, local Turan agency reports.  

Vekil Imanov and his brother Raji Imanov were arrested on October 13. Movlud claims her brothers were punished for her journalistic work. Living abroad, Gunel Movlud is a contributor of the online MeydanTV, whose journalists have repeatedly been targeted by the Azerbaijani law enforcement. Gunel Movlud is well-known for her critical articles about the authorities, Turan writes. 

Azeri Report writes  that the “Azerbaijan Democracy Act” which envisages financial/visa sanctions against Azerbaijani officials and the ensuing docile reaction from Baku shows that pressure works and it works well. The website views the Act ‘as a small victory for the proponents of a practical approach to dealing with tyrants like Ilham Aliyev.’

Ogtay Asadov, speaker of the Azerbaijani parliament, announced that the Azerbaijani government was already preparing to amnesty a number of prisoners. This statement came directly after the announcement of the bill proposal by Congressman Christopher Smith. It is widely expected that in the coming weeks numerous civil society activists will be released in reaction to the ‘tough talk from Washington.’ Azeri Report further maintains that such form of discourse would have been productive from the very beginning when Ilham Aliyev first launched his campaign against what he termed as the ‘fifth column.’

According to Azeri Report, ‘one can hardly think of a country that has more leverage over Ilham Aliyev than the United States’ as Aliyev’s tyranny is completely funded by the petro-dollars that flow from the Western oil companies and deeply interconnected with Western financial institutions. Without the so-called ‘contract of the century’ that brought in BP, Statoil and other major Western companies, Ilham Aliyev would have a fraction of the resources he now commands which he uses to systematically suppress dissent.
“Aliyev’s Azerbaijan has no industry and no agriculture that can sustain the population. Thanks to draconian measures and total financial control, there is no free enterprise in the country. Azerbaijan’s entire budget emanates from oil production. This parasitic existence has allowed Aliyev to exclude people from decision making process, while using the oil wealth to reward his supporters and punish detractors,” Azeri Report points out. 

Moreover, according to the website, nearly all of the prisoners in the country are unabashedly pro-Western in their views and activities. Aliyev has shut down every US-funded organisation in the country, including even the Peace Corps. All this taking place in a small country almost wholly funded by Western money.

Since seizing power in 2003 upon brutal crackdown on democratic opposition, Ilham Aliyev has spent millions of dollars in Western capitals ‘buying up’ influential voices which have consistently peddled a false narrative of ‘strategic partnership.’ Among the recipients of this bloodstained money are the influential lobbyist groups such as the Podesta Group, Fabiano & Company and many others.
No American or a European citizen can visit Azerbaijan without having to undergo a cumbersome and expensive visa issuance process. And even if they do succeed in visiting Azerbaijan, it is more than likely that they will be video-recorded in their private moments at the hotel for the purpose of blackmail, Azeri Report warns.

“While the introduction of the Azerbaijan Democracy Act is a positive first step, it is imperative that US policymakers keep up the pressure on Ilham Aliyev,” the website highlights.

According to the Reporters Without Borders, an Azerbaijani court is finally due to issue a verdict in the trial of Rauf Mirkadyrov, a leading independent journalist who has been detained since April 2014. The organisation reiterates its condemnation of the trumped-up charge of high treason and calls for his immediate release. ‘Held behind closed doors in the capital, Baku, this sham trial’ is finally reaching its conclusion. The prosecutor requested a sentence of seven years in prison at the previous hearing on 16 December for ‘spying on behalf of Armenia.’

“Like the trials of Khadija Ismayilova, Hilal Mammedov and so many others, Mirkadyrov’s trial has nothing to do with justice,” said Johann Bihr, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk. “This journalist is the latest victim of President Ilham Aliyev’s witchhunt against his regime’s critics. We again urge the authorities to end this persecution and to free Mirkadyrov.”

Ranked 162nd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2015 press freedom index, Aliyev’s regime has been conducting an unprecedented crackdown on independent media outlets and human rights defenders for the past two years, the organisation notes.

According to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), if Azerbaijan's leadership thought the release of prominent human rights defender Leyla Yunus would be enough to keep its critics at bay, it was wrong. “Oil-rich Azerbaijan ratified the European Convention on Human Rights in 2002, and its government has been repeatedly found to be in breach of it since then,” IWPR highlights in an article.

According to the article, the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) delivered 11 judgements on Azerbaijan last year and nine in the first half of 2015. In theory, since Azerbaijan is one of the 47 members of the Council of Europe, these judgements are binding.  But in practice, its compliance with the human rights convention has left much to be desired. Now the Council of Europe wants to change that.

“Judgements from the European Court of Human Rights have highlighted an arbitrary application of the law in Azerbaijan, notably in order to silence critical voices and limit freedom of speech,” said Council of Europe Secretary-General Thorbjørn Jagland.

On December 16, Jagland launched a rare official inquiry into Azerbaijan´s implementation of the convention. “I am particularly alarmed when individuals are deprived of their liberty due to an abuse of power by a country´s legal authorities, as the European Court of Human Rights found in the case of Ilgar Mammadov,” said Jagland.  “This is a very serious violation of the Convention.” 

IWPR notes that Mammadov is an opposition politician and leader of the Republican Alternative (REAL) movement. In March 2014, he was sentenced to seven years in jail. Two months after Mammadov was sentenced, the ECHR issued a ruling on his case. “The court concluded that the actual purpose of his detention had been to silence or punish Mr Mammadov for criticising the government and publishing information it was trying to hide,” the ECHR said in a May 2014 judgement in which it ordered Azerbaijan to pay Mammadov compensation of 22,000 euro.

While the government did pay the sum, IWPR writes, it has ignored repeated calls for Mammadov’s release made by the Council of Europe and several international human rights organisations. Mammadov remains in prison, where he was severely beaten in October. He was mentioned in a new United Nations report on torture and ill-treatment in Azerbaijan´s detention facilities published on December 9.

The United Nations Committee Against Torture said it was ‘particularly concerned’ that despite hundreds of allegations of torture in Azerbaijani detention facilities, not a single individual had been prosecuted for this between 2010 and 2015.

The authoritarian administration led by President Ilham Aliyev has intensified its crackdown on dissent in the last few years.  The country was rated as ‘not free’ by Freedom House, an international watchdog group, in its annual report Freedom in the World in 2015. Many media outlets and international NGOs in Azerbaijan have had to close. Civil society groups indicate a range of 80 to 100 political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Meanwhile, new arrests and convictions are constantly being documented, IWPR writes.

Following years of systematic efforts by the Government of Azerbaijan to eliminate the voices of independent journalists, opposition politicians, and civil society groups, Helsinki Commission Chair Rep. Chris Smith on 16 December 2015 introduced the Azerbaijan Democracy Act of 2015, a landmark bill that will deny US visas to senior members of the Azerbaijani government.