Institute of Peace and Democracy calls trials against Azerbaijan oppositionists politically motivated

The Institute of Peace and Democracy, an Azerbaijan human rights organization, issued a statement devoted to the trials against oppositionists arrested in the autumn of 2003.

"Mass falsifications in the course of the presidential election of 15 October 2003 caused mass meetings of opposition activists, which led to street clashes with law-enforcement officers on October 16," reads the statement. Numerous arrests followed it, which ended with criminal procedures against 128 people.

First 24 cases were brought into the Court for Grave Crimes in late January 2004, and trials began. As of 10 March, sentences were passed upon 39 defendants. Almost a half of them were put on probation, the others were sentenced to imprisonment for the period from 3 to 5 years.

"It is obvious that both the trials and sentences were politically motivated," notes the Institute of Peace and Democracy. In the first days of the trials, all the defendants declared that illicit methods (torture, beatings) had been used against them during investigation. All of them almost entirely denied their statements made in the period of investigation, saying they had made them under torture. Victims (mainly police officers and soldiers of interior forces) identified no concrete man (or a group of people) among the defendants as the one (the ones) who had inflicted physical trauma or material damage on them. Witnesses also identified no defendant as the one who had broken cars and panes. "This is indirect evidence of the version that authorities used special provocateurs during mass riots," the human rights organizations comments on these facts. "Investigation procedures against all the defendants have been completed. Only cases of political and public leaders have not been brought into court. These trials confirmed one more time that there is no independent judicial system in Azerbaijan, and unbiased judicial inquiry is impossible."

It is worth adding that no police officer or soldier of interior troops has been made answerable for the use of brute force against demonstrators on 15 and 16 October 2003, in spite of the death of at least one man.