Azerbaijan GPO bans rights activist Rasul Djafarov to go abroad and arrests his bank accounts

The General Prosecutor's Office (GPO) of Azerbaijan has ruled to prohibit Rasul Djafarov, a well-known civil society activist and coordinator of the campaign "Art for Democracy", from leaving the country. His bank accounts were arrested. Djafarov has appealed the GPO's decision in court.

"On July 28, I departed by train from Baku to Tbilisi on a business trip. In the morning on July 29, at the station Beyuk Kiasik, Azerbaijani border guards told me that the GPO's decision of July 25 banned my departure from Azerbaijan. No reasons were presented; and I had to return to Baku," Rasul Djafarov told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent, adding that earlier his bank accounts were arrested by the decision of the GPO.

As noted by Djafarov, he received grants as an individual user to his personal accounts from foreign donors, and it was not prohibited by the law.

He believes that the decision to arrest his bank accounts and the ban on leaving the country are a sort of "punishment" for his presentation of a report within the framework of the PACE session in Strasbourg in June this year on human rights violations in Azerbaijan, as well as for the joint submission together with 11 other country's NGOs of information about 81 Azerbaijani political prisoners.