Officials Intolerant of Political Rights - Rufat Safarov (Video)

Baku / 12.09.20 / Turan: There are serious problems with human rights in Azerbaijan. The authorities ignore human rights, officials trample them, and commit lawlessness. There is intolerance of high and medium-level officials, especially towards political rights. This opinion was expressed by the executive director of the human rights organization Line of Defense, a former political prisoner Rufat Safarov in an interview with the Azerbaijani service Voice of America.

Despite the enshrining of rights and freedoms in the Constitution and laws, in practice they remain only on paper.

According to him, the situation in places of detention is even more depressing.

“People are being arrested because of their political views on trumped-up charges. Moreover, in places of detention, they are subjected to torture and inhuman treatment. Over the past six months, a new page has opened in the "repressive story". Activists of the Popular Front Party Fuad Gahramanli, Seymur Ahmedzadeh and others were subjected to unprecedented torture.

Moreover, it has come to the point that the arrested are forced to abandon their lawyers, as was the case with Fuad Gahramanli, ”Safarov continued.

He called the recent increase in the number of hunger strikes in prisons not accidental.

In his opinion, people, having lost hope for all legal means of restoring justice, resort to such a desperate step that threatens their health and life.

A striking example of this is the hunger strike of the opposition politician Tofig Yagublu.

“His case was accompanied by total falsifications, from the protocol from the scene to the verdict. He was tried on the basis of the testimony of false witnesses, expert examination. falsification of conclusions. The defenders were not even allowed to speak with the last word, which is nonsense in criminal procedural law,” Safarov said, expressing his attitude to Yagublu's hunger strike.

Human rights defenders themselves are under pressure and persecution.

Safarov experienced this for himself when, two days after the creation of the Line of Defense organization in August and the announcement of the facts of torture over those arrested in connection with the "Karabakh action", he was summoned to the General Prosecutor's Office and warned for "illegal activities."

Safarov sees a way out of the situation in countering the repressions of the whole society and consolidating citizens. With an indifferent attitude, very soon there will be no conditions at all for the activities of civil society institutions, or political parties, or in general for dissent. — 16B06-