Your trusted source

Azerbaijan released Russian-Israeli blogger Lapshin against its own will, and the decision was made under huge international pressure, Davit Babayan, spokesperson to Artsakh President told Panorama.am.  

“Azerbaijan usually glorifies executioners, wild people, and fanatics axing asleep officer to death who would serve life imprisonment in other places, as in Hungary. Yet Azerbaijan bought Safarov, bribing Hungary and made hero of that extremely dangerous madman,” Babayan said, adding persecution of the blogger Lapshin who committed no crime seems ‘legitimate’ in Azerbaijan. In Babayan’s words, however, Azerbaijanis underestimated the reaction of the civilized world.  

To Babayan’s conviction, Azerbaijan used the Lapshin case to show it is not afraid of anything and is not accountable for its actions. “Actually, they crossed the so-called red line and failed to withstand the international pressure,” the president’s spokesperson noted.

“In a desperate attempt to save its face, Azerbaijan was forced to pardon the blogger along with number of prisoners to show it took the move out of good will. The release of the head of Turan agency was explicitly a move aimed at distracting attention and it is difficult to claim whether the amnesty was connected with Lapshin. The fact remains that the international community has toughened its approach toward Azerbaijan,” Babayan said.

To remind, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed an order on Monday on pardoning the blogger. The latter was sentenced by the Baku court on grave crimes on July 20, 2017 over his visit to Nagorno-Karabakh, following a criminal case launched into “repeated public anti-state calls” and what they claimed as “illegal crossing of Azerbaijan’s state border.”

The extradition and persecution against Lapshin was widely slammed by international community as a gross violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of speech and movement.