Special services of Azerbaijan spy even on loyal supporters of the authorities

Baku/19.07.21/Turan:According to a study published by the OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project), Azerbaijan used the spy software of Israeli of cyber-tracking devices production of the NSO Group against its journalists and activists. One of the journalists from the monitoring list, Sevinj Vagifgyzy told the Turan agency program "Difficult Question" ("Cetin Sual").

According to her, since 2019, the Azerbaijani government has been listening in to her phone conversations with the help of a special program. And this continued until the international non-governmental organization Amnesty International contacted her in May this year and informed her about it. The organization managed to get a list of wiretapped mobile phones (wiretapping has been conducted since 2016) which contained more than 50, 000 numbers of citizens from more than 50 countries. At the moment, it is known that more than 1000 numbers from this list belong to Azerbaijani citizens. These include representatives of non-governmental organizations, human rights defenders, journalists and bloggers, politicians and even deputies of the Milli Majlis. Moreover, the phones were tapped not only by representatives of the opposition, independent journalists and bloggers but by government-funded media captains and high-ranking officials as well.

"They don't trust anyone, even their loyal supporters," the journalist noted.

Vagifgizy suggests that the wiretapping was conducted for people to whom they gave money to find out whether they had been spent for their intended purpose. As for representatives of independent media, they were listened in, she holds, in order to find out what and how they were working on, their location and ambit of acquaintances, to disclose information about their personal life (for blackmailing in future). All the above creates an atmosphere of total suspicion and distrust in society.

As viewed by the journalist, preventive wiretapping of citizens is unconstitutional. With that end in view, she and her colleagues are minded to appeal to judicial authorities due to illegal wiretapping of telephone conversations.

"We understand that in terms of Azerbaijan the prospects for obtaining justice are nearly zero; this notwithstanding we are going to reach the European Court of Human Rights," Sevinj Vagifgizi noted. -0-