January

On 9 January, officers from police station No 22 of the Nasimi district police department detained videoblogger Mehman Huseynov. On 10 January, he was brought before court and fined 200 manats after being found guilty of disobeying police.

He told reporters he was tortured while in custody.

M. Musayev, the chief of the Nasimi district police department, said that this statement by Huseynov libeled the police, and filed a special lawsuit. Following the lawsuit, the Surakhani district court sentenced Mehman Huseynov to two years in prison on 3 March.

Read more “The things that happened to the media in 2017”

Hasrat Rustamov, a physician and the first deputy chair of the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, has filed a lawsuit to get his job back. He was fired on 6 October because, he says, he had attended rallies held by the National Council of Democratic Forces.

Read more “Opposition rally attendees fired from their jobs”

Azerbaijani political prisoner Abbas Huseynov has been tortured in a prison (popularly known as the Gobustan prison), in which he is held and which belongs to the Azerbaijani Justice Ministry’s Penitentiary Service. Abbas Huseynov is a deputy to the leader of the Muslim Unity movement, Taleh Baghirzadeh. The torture was carried out by the prison governor, a deputy prison chief and several guards, Huseynov told his defence lawyer Yalchin Imanov. The lawyer told us about what happened in the notorious high-security prison for especially dangerous criminals, which is located 70 kilometres outside Baku.

Read more “How political prisoners are tortured in Azerbaijan”