"Human rights violators in all corners of the world should understand that the United States is committed to support and defend human dignity and justice for those who stand up against oppression,” U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in his recent statement on the State Department 2014 Country Reports on Human Rights.
The annual report released later last month highlights that around the world, the suppression and violation of human rights is often employed by authoritarian regimes.
"As Russia slid deeper into international and economic isolation, the Putin regime intensified its crackdown on human rights defenders, including intolerance of any form of opposition and the silencing of independent media and civil society... In China, the government continued to employ pervasive ethnic discrimination, severe religious repression of Tibetan Buddhists and Uyghur Muslims, and increasing suppression of civil society, in the name of the fight against separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism," he noted.
The government in Azerbaijan, he added, 'continued to repress its critics – harassing and imprisoning dissenters for attempting to express their beliefs.'
“Tragically, 2014 also demonstrated the severity and pervasiveness of anti-Semitism and prejudice in the world today. Intolerance, expressed by anti-Semitic violence, racism, or xenophobia, takes many forms and wears many faces,' he noted.
For Senator Cardin, governments, globally, must work to eliminate this intolerance, and the United States must be ready to support this process in every way possible.
“I applaud the work of our U.S. embassies and Foreign Service officers abroad for the difficult work of chronicling human rights conditions around the world, often in countries where governments are reticent to acknowledge that such abuses take place. Now, we must do our part challenge these governments to uphold fundamental human freedoms, and signal to human rights defenders that their brave efforts are not in vain," he noted. -25D-
Politics
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On January 23, the Baku Court of Appeal considered the complaint of Meydan TV journalist Natig Javadli against the refusal to transfer him to house arrest.
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On January 23, the Deputy Commander of the Azerbaijani Ground Forces, Ilgar Latifov, met with a Pakistani delegation headed by the Director General of Military Operations, Abdullah Kashif. The parties discussed the state and prospects for the development of military cooperation between Azerbaijan and Pakistan, as well as the importance of increasing the intensity of joint exercises.
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The announcement of 2025 as the "Year of the Constitution and Sovereignty" in Azerbaijan has sparked rumors and speculation about the government's plans to hold a constitutional referendum this year. Today's statement in the Milli Majlis by the head of the parliamentary committee on human rights and concurrently the director of the Center for Humanitarian Studies, Zahid Oruj, confirmed that these expectations are not groundless.
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As part of the peace process with Azerbaijan, Armenia has proposed solutions to all agenda issues, stated Armen Grigoryan, Secretary of Armenia's Security Council, on January 23. "We are not asking for peace, we are offering peaceful solutions to all existing issues. For the two unresolved points, we have sent proposals and are waiting for a response from the Azerbaijani side. We hope that we will find solutions," Grigoryan said, according to Armenian media. Meanwhile, the press service of Azerbaijan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Turan that "negotiations on the text of the peace agreement are ongoing."
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