Azerbaijani rights defenders list 100 persons as political prisoners

The Union "For Freedom of Azerbaijani Political Prisoners" has compiled an updated list of 100 activists persecuted by the authorities. President Aliev's decision to pardon 213 prisoners has failed to solve the problem of political prisoners, human rights defenders have stated.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that rights defenders treated Ilham Aliev's pardoning as "half-hearted", since only a small part of political prisoners were pardoned on May 27.

On June 6, the above Union posted an updated list of 100 political prisoners. The compilers of the list – Leyla Yunus, Director of the Institute for Peace and Democracy (IPD), and Elshan Gasanov, the head of the Centre for Monitoring Political Prisoners, – as before, relied on the criteria for the notion of "political prisoner" established by the PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe), the Union said in its statement received by the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

The hopes that pardoning would help in solving political prisoners' problems "have failed again," Elshan Gasanov, a co-compiler of the list and the head of the above Centre, told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent. "Out of more than 120 political prisoners, only 25 were pardoned," Mr Gasanov has explained.

"Meanwhile, the flywheel of the repressive machine is unstoppable; and since last February, we have new political prisoners," Elshan Gasanov has added.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on June 6, 2022 at 04:25 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.