My personal blog, my thoughts.
With the permission of https://www.qurium.org I am posting forensic report about internet blocking in Azerbaijan. This article has a lot of technical details.
Read more “SUS-759: Sandvine and Internet blocking in Azerbaijan”
Once again, Azerbaijan has been ranked 166 in the Reporters without Borders yearly World Press Freedom Index.
The index, which ranks countries’ media situation based off of categories such as pluralism, media independence and abuses, found no positive improvement in Azerbaijan to warrant a vertical movement on the list.
Read more “Azerbaijani Media Remains in a ‘Very Serious Situation’”
A groundbreaking forensic report tracks Azerbaijan’s recent destruction of 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate cross-stones, and 22,000 tombstones.
In April 2011, when a US Ambassador traveled to Azerbaijan, on the southwestern edge of the former USSR, he was denied access to the riverside borderland that separates this South Caucasus nation from Iran. But it was not a foreign foe that halted the visit. Instead, his Azerbaijani hosts insisted that the envoy’s planned investigation inside the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan (officially, Naxçıvan Autonomous Republic) could not proceed because it was motivated by fake news. The ambassador had intended to probe the reported destruction of thousands of historical Medieval Christian Armenian artworks and objects at the necropolis of Djulfa in Nakhichevan. This cemetery is recorded to have once boasted the world’s largest collection of khachkars — distinctive Armenian cross-stones. However, according to Azerbaijani officials this reported destruction was a farce, that the site had not been disturbed, because it never existed in the first place. Despite ample testimony to the contrary, Azerbaijan claims that Nakhichevan was never Armenian.
Read more “A Regime Conceals Its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture”
On January 7th 2019,VirtualRoad, the secure hosting project of the Qurium – Media Foundation published a report documenting fresh attacks against Azerbaijan’s oldest opposition newspaper Azadliq’s website (azadliq.info). The report concluded: “After ten months trying to keep azadliq.info online inside Azerbaijan using our Bifrost service and bypassing multi-million dollars DPI deployments, this is one more sign of to what extent a government is committed to information control”. The DPI deployments also known as Deep Packet inspection have been used in Azerbaijan since March 2017 and is best described as digital eavesdropping that allows information extraction.
Read more “In Azerbaijan, big brother is watching you everywhere: offline, online, on mobile devices and social media apps”
On January 18, 1990, a group of US senators, including the future Secretary of State John Kerry, sent a letter to the USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev in connection with the pogroms of Armenians in Baku:
“We are deeply concerned about the killings, violence, and plunder of the Armenian population committed by groups of organized Azerbaijanis over the past six days.
Read more “Statement by US Senators on the Organized Massacre of Armenians in Baku, 1990”
These January days, Armenians around the world remember the victims of the Armenian pogroms in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, 29 years ago. For a whole week, from January 13 to 19, 1990, the Azerbaijani authorities organized and carried out mass pogroms of the Armenian population of the city. About a quarter of a million local Armenians were subjected to violence and deportation only because of their national identity, as a result there is no Armenian left in Baku now.
The immovable and movable property of thousands of Armenians was looted and taken away. According to estimates of various international organizations, about 500 Armenians became victims of the violence.
Read more “Azerbaijan must admit the guilt for Armenian pogroms”
Today’s European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judgment in favour of an Azerbaijani journalist who faced a sex-tape smear campaign after investigating government corruption exposes the ongoing crackdown on freedom of expression in the country, Amnesty International said.
Read more “European Court ruling provides some justice for journalist who faced sex tape ordeal”
An Azerbaijani media-rights group has added its name to the list of organizations urging the government to release a hunger-striking blogger who was targeted with a new charge just weeks before his expected release from prison.
Members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and other watchdog groups, and The Washington Post’s editorial board have also demanded that 26-year-old Mehman Huseynov be freed.
Read more “Demands Mount For Hunger-Striking Azerbaijani Blogger’s Release Amid New Charges”
Mehman Huseynov, who was imprisoned in 2017 after posting incriminating photographs of properties he claimed were owned by government officials, was set to be released in March of 2019. However, new charges have been brought against him which carry a five to seven year prison sentence if found guilty.
A Baku district court issued an arrest warrant against Netherlands-based Azerbaijani video blogger and social media activist Ordukhan Teymurkhan, Radio Liberty reported last Friday relying on a source from the Prosecutor’s Office.
Teymurkhan is charged under three articles of the criminal code relating to calls for terrorism, mass riots and attacks against the state, the sentence for which is up to eight years in prison.
Read more “Criminal case launched against exiled blogger Ordukhan Teymurkhan”