Azerbaijani court dismisses Mamedov's complaint against CEC's refusal to register him as presidential candidate

On September 20, the Baku Court of Appeal (BCA) dismissed the complaint filed by Ilgar Mamedov, the leader of the civil movement "Republican Alternative" (ReAl) about the refusal of the Azerbaijani Central Election Commission (CEC) to register him as a presidential candidate.

Earlier, the "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the refusal was explained by insufficient number of valid signatures submitted in favour of Ilgar Mamedov. On September 18, the signatures that were recognized by the CEC as invalid were re-examined.

Judge Nagieva has announced that the graphological examination was carried out by specialists of the Centre for Expertise of the Ministry of Justice and that the results of the examination support the conclusion of the CEC's experts. This was told to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent by Natiq Djafarli, Executive Secretary of the civil movement "ReAl".

"So, the opinions of the experts of the Ministry of Justice and the experts of the CEC were practically identical concerning more than 4000 signatures. And, as it turned out, only in 40 cases, the CEC's experts "erroneously" recognized valid signatures as falsified. Meanwhile, the trial failed to explain, what exactly the experts of the Ministry of Justice took as basis for their conclusions," Natiq Djafarli has said. According to his statement, Ilgar Mamedov claimed the biased attitude of the experts and the trial that performed a political order of the authorities.