Khadija Ismayilova returns home after her release (on probation) in May 2015. In September 2015, the acclaimed investigative journalist was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison on charges of fraud and tax evasion. Image still via YouTube / Turan Agentliyi. Some rights reserved.
Azerbaijan’s ruling Aliyev dynasty is tightening the screws, and last year was a new low. At the end of 2016, Bayram Mammadov and Giyas Ibrahimov, two activists for youth movement N!DA, were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for spraying graffiti on the statue of former Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev. “Happy Slave Day”, they wrote — a play on the similarity of the words gül (“flower”) and qul (“slave”) in Azerbaijani.
Amnesty International has recognised Mammadov and Ibrahimov as prisoners of conscience. And they’re far from the only ones. We could mention the jailed video blogger Mehman Hüseynov or the journalist Afghan Mukhtarli, who was recently abducted from the Georgian capital and sentenced on bogus charges in Baku. We could mention many more still, and hold international campaigns for their release. Sometimes, as in the case of famous journalist Khadija Ismayilova, this pressure even bears some fruit.
