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.