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“Azerbaijan is consistently pursuing the human rights activists and the media representatives who pay visits to Artsakh. It is, of course, an unaccepted approach. Turning to the extradition of Russian-Israeli blogger Alexander Lapshin to Azerbaijan, Chairman of Yerevan Press Club Boris Navasardyan note the aforesaid during the interview conducted by Panorama.am.

Chairman of Yerevan Press Club is more concerned about the actions of the Belarusian authorities regarding the case.

“They have violated the international norms in several respects. Firstly, they have in fact supported Azerbaijan to bring the citizen of a third country to a criminal liability. Lapshin is neither a Belorussian nor an Azerbaijani citizen. Secondly, being well aware of the human rights violations of the detainees in Azerbaijan Belarus decided to extradite Lapshin. The international norms envisage that people under arrest should not be extradited to such countries no matter what punishments they face,” Boris Navasardyan noted.

He underscored that the charges filed against Lapshin cannot be considered grave, even in terms of the international law.

In the words of Navasardyan during this period they have held talks with their Azerbaijani and Belarusian counterparts to take the blogger’s case to the authorities.

“Unfortunately we are well aware of the state of media in Azerbaijan and they were not likely to voice that issue. However, in Belarus we managed to get the civil society representatives to apply to the authorities of the country to refrain from extraditing the blogger. But all those efforts turned out to be useless amid the whole political context. During that time we also cooperated with the international human rights groups,” he added.

Today Ombudsman of the Artsakh Republic Ruben Melikyan announced that Lapshin’s case will become a reverse precedent calling on the human rights groups and reporters of Armenia to get involved in the process of making the Lapshin case a reverse precedent.

Asked whether Navasardyan and the organization under his lead intend to join those activities he noted: “We have always worked on the issue. We have constantly voiced that it is not right to isolate the unrecognized republics. The isolation will deepen the issue and can no way contribute to the peaceful settlement of the conflicts. We have always made efforts to get the civil society organization of the NKR involved in different formats,” he noted.

Navasardyan underscored the visit of a large number of reporters to Nagorno Karabakh as the society has the right to be aware of the developments in the republic.

Together with his partners, Navasardyan has conducted a study to estimate the risk for the Armenian human rights activists or reporters  facing such charges in case of visiting NKR.

“Our findings indicate no such risks, however we cannot be sure for 100 percent. We might have had no concerns over Lapshin’s case one-two months ago, but in fact, such an attitude would not be justified,” he added.

Notably Russian-Israeli blogger Alexander Lapshin was detained in Minsk upon the request of the Azerbaijani authorities. He was put on an international wanted list at Azerbaijan’s request after visiting the Nagorno Karabakh Republic and criticizing the Azerbaijani leadership.

Azerbaijani prosecutors launched a criminal case into "repeated public anti-state calls" and "illegal crossing of Azerbaijan’s state border," punishable with a prison term of five to eight years.