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Publishing
of an International Mission of Judicial Observation Report on
the current trial of three political prisoners
Paris,
November 14, 2002
Although
President Aliyev restored a certain amount of political stability
in the mid-nineties, he very soon blocked the process of democratisation
in order to reinforce his own power.
The FIDH
international mission, that went to Baku (Azerbaijan) from 4
to 9 july 2002, observed that Mr. Aliyev implemented a strategy
to neutralise any form of social or political opposition, including
the use of violence. Police repression of the social protest
movement in Nardaran on June 3 last is a clear example. In order
to silence the villagers who had social requests, police fired
into the crowd, killing one person and they arrested 18 demonstrators
and leaders of local opposition who were subsequently beaten
up. To justify their acts, the authorities present these social
movements as political movements of Islamic fundamentalists
manipulated by Iran.
Various
methods are used by the authorities in order to hold on to power
at any price. These include:
- electoral
and legislative fraud as recently happened with the referendum
on August 24. The date for the referendum was set by presidential
decree only two months before it was held, without prior consultation
with the Parliament;
- harassment of NGOs and the media;
- pressure on opposition leaders (arrests and arbitrary detentions,
legal harassment, arbitrary redundancies, ban on demonstrations
and meetings, difficulties to register for opposition parties,
raids on opposition party offices). At the beginning of October
over a dozen members of the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan and
the Musavat Party were arrested and condemned to several days
detention. They were finally released on October 5 after pressure
from the United States.
This has
inevitably lead to a deterioration in the human rights situation.
The President
has given many guarantees in the field of international and
regional human rights protection (ratification of the main human
rights instruments, adoption of legislation monitored by experts
from the Council of Europe, successive waves of releases of
prisoners...). Yet these guarantees are only partial and are
even used as an alibi to conceal the lack of independence of
the judiciary as well as egregious violations of fundamental
freedoms.
The case
of the new trial of three political prisoners, Messrs. Gamidov,
Gumbatov and Gaziyev, is a clear example of this. These three
prisoners considered as political prisoners by the Council of
Europe, have been granted a new trial thanks to the pressure
from this institution of which Azerbaijan is a member since
2001. But the conditions of these trials do not guarantee the
right to a fair and impartial trial. These trials are held in
the prison where the prisoners are detained and the international
mission found that the following violations were being committed:
absence of presumption of innocence, absence of public hearings,
violations of defence rights and degrading detention conditions.
The authorities
still refuse to consider them as political prisoners. These
trials which began in May 2002, are more like a legal mascarade,
and
the verdict is highly predictable. In September, during the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the President's
son, Mr. Ilham
Aliyev, using the international situation to counter criticism,
said these prisoners were terrorists.
Press contact
: Julianne Falloux : 33-1 43 55 2518
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