Azerbaijan rights activist: political prisoners' evidence tortured out, untrustworthy

In connection with a campaign which the pro-government media has launched against the Human Rights Center of Azerbaijan (HRCA) and the Institute of Peace and Democracy because their proposed list of presumed political prisoners included people convicted on charges of the explosion in the Baku subway in March 1994, HRCA Director Eldar Zeinalov says the following:

Our decision to include these citizens of Azerbaijan in the list of presumed political prisoners is due not as much to their belonging to a definite political organization as to the investigation into this case and the trial not meeting even national standards, let alone European ones. In particular, Article 46 of the Constitution bans torture; Article 63, establishing the presumption of innocence, bans the use of evidence obtained with violation of the law. Every citizen has the right to appeal against their sentence, according to Article 65. Meanwhile, the hearing that was over in May 1996 with two death sentences pronounced ignored repudiations of evidence and torture statements, while the sentence itself, pronounced by the lower panel of the Supreme Court was definitive and not subject to appeal by way of review proceedings. The same day, the convicts were placed on death row; investigation agency officers came there in defiance of the law in a few days and publicly urged the people under sentence of death to kill those convicts. One of them died afterwards under suspicious circumstances, while another survived an attempt on his life.

Investigation agencies have repeatedly announced uncovering terrorist conspiracies on the part of various opposition forces in the past eleven years: the People's Front (A. Gasymov, Gasan Toku and others); the Musavat Party (M. Huseinli, R. Arifoglu); the military (V. Musaev, A. Sysoev and others), special police (E. Amiraslanov and others). Because illicit inquest methods were used in the investigation into those cases, the public opinion perceives all these cases with much criticism, while Council of Europe experts recognized the convicts in these cases as political prisoners. There is no logic in treating the subway blast case otherwise given the critical perception of the other terrorist conspiracy cases. What's more, real terrorists may now be at large threatening our security, if the wrong people were convicted as a result of torture and false confessions.

It should be noted that political prisoners must be released or go on a new trial in line with European standards, according to Opinion 222(2000), a document which states Azerbaijan's obligations to the Council of Europe. If the government is not inclined to release some or other political prisoner, they must start a new trial. In doing so, new violations of legal procedures, like it was in the case of A. Gummatov and R. Gaziev, step up the positions of advocates of political prisoners' release. To my mind, nothing prevents the nation's leadership from conducting a new trial and resolving all doubts in this case in a civilized way instead of proceeding with persecution of human rights advocates.