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The first shots of the well-known Azerbaijani rights defender Leyla Yunus after she was released shocked the public as she had grown very old during the year in prison. Arif Yunus, her husband, thinks that she will need at least two or three years to recover her health, Ekho Kavkaza reports.
Commenting on Yunus’ release and home arrest, Azerbaijani political analyst Zardusht Alizadeh told the radio that this was all decided in advance. “On this case, if Arif, who was convicted on even more serious charges to a shorter prison term, was released, it was natural that Leyla would be released as well,” he said.

Alizadeh opined that it was not on humanitarian grounds that the rights defenders were transferred to house arrest but rather on the request of the Foreign Minister of France and French politicians who do not think it proper that ‘a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour sit in prison and suffer.’

“In my opinion, their conditional release will soon be changed and they will be pardoned, that is, found guilty but pardoned (out of generosity). Then, they will be allowed to leave for France, from where they will probably depart to the Netherlands, to their daughter,” Alizadeh said.

As for the possibility for the rights defenders to be able to continue their activities abroad, he said that even politically more significant people, who leave Azerbaijan, can do nothing abroad but holding pickets in front of the country’s embassies, organising campaigns, protests and gathering signatures, which have no influence on Azerbaijan.

On 9 December, Baku Court of Appeal ruled to release the well-known Azerbaijani rights defender Leyla Yunus from the courtroom and change her punishment to suspended sentence. On 12 November, Baku Court of Appeals made a decision to release Arif Yunus, one of the best-known political prisoners in Azerbaijan, from jail. His arrest was changed with a signature for not leaving the country.

On 13 August 2015, Baku Court of Grave Crimes brought in a verdict against the Azerbaijani human rights defenders Leyla and Arif Yunus, sentencing them to 8.5 years and 7 years’ imprisonment respectively. Leyla Yunus was arrested in the yard of her house on 30 July 2014. She was charged with high treason, tax evasion, illegal entrepreneurship, forgery and large-scale fraud. Her husband, Arif Yunus, also faced charges of high treason and large-scale fraud.

In 2014, Francois Hollande, the French President, met Leyla Yunus in Baku and awarded her with the Order of the Legion of Honour. Yunus was detained soon after. In the same year, Human Rights Watch issued an open letter urging President Hollande to raise human rights concerns during his meeting with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev. France was particularly concerned over Leyla Yunus’ plight.

Elshan Hasanov, the head of the Monitoring Centre for Political Prisoners, told Turan agency that the human rights situation went on aggravating during 2015. “The practice of groundless arrests, unlawful court rulings, deaths as a result of tortures and suicide attempts in prisons and police departments is still operating in the country, the freedom of assembly and speech are restricted, the press is persecuted, journalists are subjected to physical attacks, the right for private property is trampled on,” Hasanov said and stressed that none of the officials involved in the tortures has been punished so far. “The authorities openly ignore the calls of the civil society for a dialogue and cooperation.”

As a result, the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights are violated, in particular: Article 3 (Prohibition of torture), Article 5 (Right to liberty and security), Article 6 (Right to a fair trial), Article 7 (No punishment without law), Article 9 (Freedom of thought, conscience and religion) and Article 11 (Freedom of assembly and association).

Press Emblem Campaign (PEC), a Geneva-based NGO with Special consultative UN status, compiled an annual report over persecuted journalists. Two Azerbaijani journalists, Khadija Ismayilova and Emin Huseynov, were included in the list. The report is published on the website of the organisation.

“The Press Emblem Campaign (PEC) is deeply outraged by sentencing of journalist Khadija Ismayilova to 7.5 years in prison, handed down by an Azerbaijani court on 1 September. The harsh sentence is clearly politically motivated, given the lack of due process in the case and the absence of credible evidence presented by the prosecution,” the group writes.

PEC also writes about the opposition journalist and the chairman of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety, Emin Huseynov, who was sheltered for 10 months at the Swiss embassy in Baku. Before 11 February 2015, when a Swiss national television report revealed this, the embassy had been secretly sheltering the Azerbaijani journalist for the previous six months (from August 2014).  Huseynov was allowed to fly out to Switzerland a day after the inaugural European Games opened in ‘the tightly-controlled country.’ PEC congratulated the Swiss diplomats for their successful efforts, but deplored that seven other journalists remain behind the bars on the basis of fabricated charges.

As for the overall situation across the world, PEC notes that 2015 has seen no progress for the protection of journalists as 128 journalists have been killed in 31 countries during the year.

On 1 September 2015, Baku Court of Grave Crimes handed down a 7.6 years prison sentence to the Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova. The court found her guilty of the Articles 179 (embezzlement and misappropriation), 192 (illegal business), 213 (tax evasion) and 308 (abuse of power) of the Criminal Code of Azerbaijan. Meanwhile, Ismayilova was cleared from the article 125 (incitement to commit suicide) of the Criminal Code of Azerbaijan. Earlier, the public prosecutor, Ramazan Hadiyev, had claimed 9 years of imprisonment for Khadija Ismayilova. The journalist was detained on 5 December 2014, which was followed by a wave of condemning statements by a number of international organisations and influential representatives from various states, who claimed her arrest was politically motivated.