Azerbaijani activists demand to release Ali Aliev

The Public Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Ali Aliev, the leader of the "Citizens and Development" Party sentenced to five months in custody, has been set up in Azerbaijan. Its members treat Aliev's arrest as an attack on the freedom of expression.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that Ali Aliev, the Chair of the Azerbaijani oppositional "Citizens and Development" Party, was sentenced to five months in custody under a libel case. The lawsuits against him were filed by two border guards who survived a helicopter crash on November 30, 2021. Politicians and human rights activists in Azerbaijan condemned the verdict.

In his interview with the YouTube channel Osmanqızı TV, Aliev doubted the fact that the two border guards survived in the helicopter crash, as "they even had no scratches in their faces."

Rufat Safarov, the executive director of the NGO "Defence Line", has noted that Aliev's arrest is "another link in the chain of facts of pressure on journalists and activists in connection with their exercise of the freedom of expression."

"In Azerbaijan, people are already arrested not only for criticism, but also for voicing out one's personal opinion, as it happened with the crash of a border troops' helicopter. Amid the absence of clear authorities' explanations of the reasons for the tragedy, citizens began expressing their own viewpoints. And Ali Aliev has also doubted the official version," Fuad Gakhramanly, a member of the Presidium of the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan (PFPA), has stated.

In the opinion of Mekhman Aliev, the director of the "Turan" News Agency, arrests of journalists on charges of defamation and the "repressive" media law are "part of the authorities' policies aimed at restricting the freedom of the Azerbaijani information community."