The battle for the "third" house

Baku/27.07.21 / Turan: In the program "Difficult Question" lawyer Alesker Mammadli told about the appeal of media representatives and non-governmental organizations to the President of Azerbaijan with a request to transfer apartments in the third house built for journalists to the families of martyrs and heroes of the 44-day war, and what came of it.

According to him, the government cannot irrevocably give these  apartments to journalists. The specifics of the journalism profession is that, along with informing the population, a journalist also conducts an "audit" of the activities of the government, its various bodies and officials to inform the public about it. In case where a journalist intends to engage in such an audit for a long time, then he cannot be associated with officials, nor accept gifts from them. The point is that gifts of this sort make a journalist to remain dumb. The principles of journalism, its ethical norms do not allow a journalist to accept any gifts, let alone such an expensive gift as an apartment. These are basic principles and norms of journalism all over the world.

It should be added that Azerbaijan also has its Code of Professional Ethics of Journalist that was drawn up in 2003. Thus, Paragraph 1 of Article 5 of the Code prohibits a journalist from accepting any expensive gifts stimulating and concurrently having a negative impact on his professional activity. In other words, 8 years ago the journalists decided that they would not accept apartments, gifts, privileges, financial support from the government. Unfortunately, in 2009, the government established its control over the media and all other areas of public life.

Mammadli believes that the government did this in two ways. The first is when, step by step, periodicals and publications artificially went bankrupt, and then were taken over by the authorities. The second is when, under the guise of showing concern, they began to allocate grants to them, finance them as a part of state support for the media, build houses for journalists, organize their holidays in five-star hotels abroad. All this is nothing but bribing journalists.

As for the actualization of the idea of transferring apartments in the third house built for journalists to the families of martyrs and war heroes, the lawyer did not rule out that this was caused by a sense of gratitude felt for those who defended their country with weapons in their hands. However, other motives are not excluded. Since, earlier, the same people, and even most of them did not even remember those lost and wounded in the First  Karabakh War or during the April 2016 fighting. They got the apartments themselves, distributed them among their relatives, mistresses, colleagues, etc.

Also, Mammadli believes that the policy of "the state support for the media" pursued for about 11 years has failed as well. As a result, the government decided to put an end to the distribution of apartments to journalists. The families of martyrs and war heroes turned up as a plausible excuse. Perhaps, after the distribution of apartments in the "third" house among them, it'd be possible to forget about the construction of new houses for journalists.

The lawyer also did not rule out the possibility that the issue of the" third" house surfaced to change the information agenda – to distract the public from the scandal related to the wiretapping of gadgets by the authorities. The point is about the wiretapping of the members of civil society, human rights defenders, leaders and opposition activists using the Pegasus program of the Israeli company NSO Group. Another scandal that broke out after journalists hoping to get apartments in a new house criticized the signatories of the petition as saying that those concerned about the welfare of martyrs and war heroes can provide them with real estate given to them by the state.—0—