Head of oppositional MeydanTV accuses Azerbaijani authorities of putting pressure on his relatives

In Azerbaijan, relatives of Emin Milli, the executive director of the online channel MeydanTV, who is abroad, have sent a collective appeal to the country's president, in which they condemn Milli for his critical attitude to the authorities' policies; the director himself believes that his relatives did it under pressure.

"What they [the authorities] are doing has no effect on me. But they bully my relatives, humiliate them and force them to repudiate me. They want to deprive them of their human dignity and threat them with arrest and death," Emin Milli wrote on July 31 in his page on the Facebook.

Arastun Orudjlu, the head of the Azerbaijani "East-West" Research Centre, has treated "the collective renunciation of relatives from Emin Milli as a sad event in the modern history of Azerbaijan."

"In order to safeguard themselves against the loss of job and a piece of bread; to defend themselves against slander, arrests and pressure, they are forced to collectively reject their relatives. Bringing people to such a state is inhuman," Orudjlu told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.