Official Baku called the EU statement in the Council of Europe regarding human rights violations in Azerbaijan “biased and unfair”.
After the meeting of the Council of Ministers in Strasbourg on September 11, the EU delegation in the Council of Europe adopted a statement, calling on Baku to put an end to arbitrary arrests of journalists and activists. The EU delegation considered this practice of Baku to be worrisome, stressing that the number of arbitrary arrests of independent journalists, human rights defenders and civil society representatives is increasing.
Baku considered this “interference in the internal affairs of Azerbaijan”.
Aykhan Hajizade, the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan, called on the EU, “instead of making baseless statements against Azerbaijan, to focus on human rights violations in EU countries.”
Hajizade also called the EU’s statement a “smear campaign” ahead of the UN Climate Summit (COP29) to be held in November in Azerbaijan, stressing: – “All human rights are protected in Azerbaijan, considerable progress has been made in the direction of bringing it into line with international standards, and the claims of the European Union in this regard are completely groundless.”
The Platform for the Protection of Journalists cooperating with the Council of Europe recently published a report stating that 55 journalists are in prison in the 47 countries that are members of the Council of Europe, 16 of them in Azerbaijan alone. Last November, the Azerbaijani authorities arrested and detained at least ten journalists, including almost the entire editorial staff of the online newspaper Abzas Media. At the beginning of March, 9 journalists cooperating with the independent television channel Toplum TV broadcast on the Internet were arrested.
The “Freedom for Political Prisoners Movement” reconciled in August, counting that in the past three months, Aliyev’s administration imprisoned 34 more people for their political views. According to the organization’s latest calculations, there are at least 204 political prisoners in Azerbaijan.