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The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, is showing signs of a frantic despotism. Journalists, bloggers, lawyers, human rights activists and others who speak out for individual liberty are arbitrarily being swept up in a wave of arrests and detentions. Mr. Aliyev, suffering a decline in the oil revenue that has propped up his regime for years, seems to be striking out at anyone who opposes him, American daily newspaper The Washington Post writes.

“One of Mr. Aliyev’s favorite tools for silencing people is pretrial detention. Azeri law states that it is to be used only in limited cases, and Azerbaijan’s criminal procedure code put this power in the hands of the courts, not prosecutors, more than a decade ago. In practice, though, the courts have become servants of the prosecution. The European Court for Human Rights noted in a case last year that Azeri courts have frequently endorsed prosecution requests for detention automatically,” the newspaper writes.

In the article the examples of the Azerbaijani human rights defender Leyla Yunus and her husband historian Arif Yunus are brought, whose pretrial detention was extended for 5 months by the decision of the court in February, at the end of which they will have been behind bars for nearly a year without trial, despite their problems with health. Meanwhile, the campaign against critical journalists continues. The Washington Post highlights that three days after the detained journalist Khadija Ismayilova’s letter appeared on their outlet, a closed-door trial found her guilty of criminal libel and fined. On the same day as her snap trial, a former chief of the RFE/RL Baku bureau was stopped at the airport and told he was under a travel ban at the request of the prosecutor’s office. More than 26 journalists and staff of RFE/RL have been interrogated by Azeri authorities since a Dec. 26 raid on the Baku bureau.

“In a recent magazine advertisement, Mr. Aliyev said he wanted to make Azerbaijan ‘one of the most developed and competitive countries in the world.’ It certainly won’t become that if he continues to rule like a despot,” the outlet concludes.