Press Review 05/12/2016

Azadlig reports that banks have been instructed not to make any concessions to citizens who took loans in dollars. The author proposes to divide the amount of the loans between the state, the bank and the citizens and accuses the government of contempt of its citizens, recalling the suicides related to bank loans.

Echo: CE Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland has published the annual report "The situation of democracy, human rights and the rule of law", which covers all the European countries, except Belarus.

Overall, the report is a compilation of the documents made in 2015 by the CE Commissioner for Human Rights, CE Parliamentary Assembly, the European Court of Human Rights, and the CE Committee of Ministers.

 The 104-page document includes the opinion of the Secretary General of the state of affairs in Azerbaijan. In particular, in the section on safety of journalists, it cites a December statement by the Council of Europe on the "arbitrary application of criminal law to restrict freedom of expression."

In this regard, it mentions the ECHR decisions not executed by Azerbaijan on the cases of the journalists Makhmudov, Aghazadeh and Fatullayev, and the Secretary General’s concern over the case of the journalist Khadija Ismayilova.

Azerbaijan is mentioned in a "small but significant" list of CE member countries where "the state controls most of the media and censors their content."

Bizim Yol writes about the beating of a resident of the Kurdamir region Gylman Piriyev by a police officer Asif Faradjev and his relatives in front of the loc al mosque on March 31. In this respect, the victim Behruz Bayramov's lawyer appealed to the Prosecutor General Zakir Garalov. The beating, the cause of which was the victim’s intention to build a fence between himself and a neighbor, was fixed by a surveillance camera.

The lawyer said his client has a broken leg and arm, a traumatic brain injury, and damaged internal organs. However, the investigator states that only a broken arm will be mentioned in the conclusion of the examination. In fact, the lawyer said, no examination was carried out. Of the four, only one was brought to justice.