Azerbaijan - One of Leaders in Violations of Freedom of Speech and Press, Conference in Strasbourg

On Friday, March 24 in Strasbourg, the Council of Europe hosted a conference titled “Promoting dialogue between the European Court of Human Rights and the free press community”.

The main topics of the conference were: defamation and protection of private information, investigative journalism and access to official information, protection of information sources, the right to protests and the role of the media in trials.

The reports on these issues were made by leading European experts, ECHR and Council of Europe workers, and journalists themselves.

The main theses of these speeches were that freedom of speech and expression, as one of the main values ​​and standards of Europe, has been seriously affected in recent years. It is particularly unfortunate that such processes are actively developing in a number of Council of Europe member countries.

Among those are Russia, Turkey and Azerbaijan. Negative trends are also observed in Hungary.

The speakers expressed serious concern about these processes, which "undermine the very basis of the Council of Europe as an organization," said ECHR Vice President, Hungarian judge Andras Saio.

There is a blurring of those values, ​​for the protection of which the Council of Europe was created, with freedom of speech and expression among them, he noted.

A serious political problem is the search for ways and mechanisms to uphold and protect these values, which is not available today.

Other speakers noted the use by the authorities of a number of countries of increasingly sophisticated methods to suppress press freedom and the actual introduction of censorship or self-censorship. Among those, Russia, Turkey and Azerbaijan were again named, where the governments act particularly unceremoniously and defiantly.

According to the Russian expert Galina Arapova, the authorities of these and other countries openly ignore or violate their own obligations to the Council of Europe and the provisions of the numerous international conventions that they themselves signed.

These governments should understand the consequences of such a policy and be sure that the ECHR will continue to take decisions against such governments, because the Council of Europe will not under any circumstances calmly observe what is happening, the ECHR judge Robert Spano said.

If some governments think that they manage to impose their will on the Council of Europe, they are mistaken. With such a policy, some governments are only moving away from the Council of Europe, he stressed.

Another common thought of speakers was that the walls of the Council of Europe have recently been increasingly shaken by corruption scandals caused by attempts by individual member countries to openly lobby their interests in order to defend themselves from criticism for human rights violations. Among these countries, Azerbaijan was again mentioned, as it continues to ignore the decisions of the ECHR and strives to place itself above the Council of Europe.

One of the official representatives of Azerbaijan to the Council of Europe tried to refute this statement, saying that only two decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) were taken on the issues of violations of freedom of expression in Azerbaijan, and both of them were executed. “Therefore, it is incorrect to mention Azerbaijan in this context,” he said.

However, several panelists rejected this statement, noting that the state of freedom of speech and press in Azerbaijan is well known. If there were only two decisions on Azerbaijan, this does not mean that there are no more violations. Dozens of cases of journalists convicted in Azerbaijan are currently in the ECHR at the stage of consideration and communication.

And if evaluated, the situation has become worse and this trend continues. So, today Azerbaijan and Turkey are leaders among the member states of the Council of Europe in terms of the number of journalists and bloggers arrested.

It was especially noted that after the promises not to arrest journalists on the defamation article and long years of the moratorium, the authorities sentenced the blogger Mehman Huseynov precisely on the defamation article.

One of the members of the delegation of Azerbaijani journalists noted that in recent years numerous amendments to the legislation have been adopted in Azerbaijan that sharply restricted freedom of speech and expression and journalistic investigations and contradicted Azerbaijan's own obligations to the Council of Europe. To this we must add strict control of social networks by the authorities and the authorities' desire to legislate to restrict the freedom of expression on the Internet.

Two days before, members of a delegation of journalists from Azerbaijan, within the framework of a joint project of the Council of Europe and the European Union called the CoE / EU joint PCF project “Freedom of expression and media freedom in Azerbaijan”, held a series of meetings with representatives of various departments of the Council of Europe and the ECHR.

At these closed meetings, the situation in Azerbaijan was discussed separately and was assessed negatively. The general result of these meetings was a message that Strasbourg will not under any circumstances reconcile with the repressive policy of Baku and all possible measures and steps will be taken to counteract this. -02B-