Azerbaijani authorities should immediately secure the release of
leading human rights defender Leyla Yunus from pretrial custody, and
drop the politically motivated charges against her and her husband Arif
Yunus, Human Rights Watch said today. The authorities should also end
their ongoing harassment against the couple.
“The context leading up to these recent charges, including the
harassment they have endured over the past four months, make it clear
that the charges against Leyla and Arif Yunus are bogus and intended to
silence them,” said Rachel Denber,
deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The
authorities should immediately end this campaign of intimidation against
Azerbaijan’s leading human rights defenders and allow them to work
unimpeded.”
Azerbaijan’s
international partners, including the Council of Europe leadership and
its member countries, should make clear that continued harassment of
human rights defenders, and the Yunuses in particular, will have direct
effects on their relationships with Azerbaijan’s government.
Leyla Yunus is the director of the Institute for Peace and Democracy, a
human rights group formed in 1995 that has focused on combating
politically motivated prosecutions, corruption, violence against women,
and unlawful house evictions. The organization has also been involved in
projects aimed at improving people-to-people dialogue between
intellectuals and community leaders in Azerbaijan and Armenia, against
the background of the unresolved conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the
autonomous enclave in Azerbaijan primarily populated by ethnic
Armenians.
On July 30, 2014, at about 11:45 a.m., representatives of the Grave
Crimes Investigation Unit of the General Prosecutor’s Office, detained
Leyla Yunus on her way to a conference at a partner organization’s
office and drove her to the general prosecutor’s office, Arif Yunus told
Human Rights Watch.
Shortly thereafter, about six men in civilian clothes rang the bell at
the Yunus’s residence. Arif Yunus refused to open the door until he
could summon his lawyer, but by the time his lawyer arrived, the men
were gone. Yunus decided to turn himself in to the general prosecutor’s
office and arrived there with his lawyer shortly after 1 p.m.
Yunus told Human Rights Watch that he and his wife were accused of
spying for the Armenian secret services and interrogated in separate
rooms. He said that they chose to remain silent and not to respond to
any questions because the charges were so humiliating and absurd.
The investigators claimed that the Yunuses have used foreign grant
money to recruit Azerbaijani citizens to participate in second-track
diplomacy efforts over the unresolved conflict of Nagorno-Karabakh, and
used this as a cover for espionage.
Investigators also claimed that the couple operated an unregistered
nongovernmental organization and failed to pay taxes on grants they
received. While it is true that the Institute for Peace and Democracy is
not registered, the authorities make it almost impossible for human
rights organizations in Azerbaijan to register.
After six hours of interrogation, the prosecutor’s office pressed
charges against both Leyla and Arif Yunus. Criminal charges against
Leyla Yunus include treason (criminal code article 274), fraud causing
large damages (article 178.3.2), illegal entrepreneurship by an
organized group (article 192.2.2), tax evasion (article 213), and
falsifying official documents (article 320). Arif Yunus was charged with
treason and fraud.
For health considerations, the authorities released Arif Yunus under
house arrest and police supervision, while Baku’s Nasimi District Court
sent Leyla Yunus directly from the courtroom to pretrial custody for
three months. Arif Yunus told Human Rights Watch that his wife suffers
from severe diabetes and requires special meals at certain intervals. He
said he feared the authorities would not provide her with adequate care
in detention.
“This arrest and the charges have been in the making for some months
now and appear to be in retaliation for the Yunuses human rights work
and their outspoken criticism of the authorities,” Denber said. “The
authorities should immediately release Leyla Yunus from pretrial
detention and drop the charges in the absence of any credible evidence
that they are justifiable.”
On April 28, Baku airport police prevented the couple from leaving the
country, confiscated their passports, and subjected them to a 24-hour ordeal
of interrogations and house searches that led to Arif Yunus’s
hospitalization with hypertension. The prosecutor’s office subsequently
designated them witnesses in a treason investigation against an
Azerbaijani journalist and civil society activist, Rauf Mirgadirov, who
was deported from Turkey on April 19 and then arrested in Baku.
Since then the authorities have repeatedly summoned the couple for
interrogations. However, the Yunuses have refused to cooperate with the
investigation until their passports are returned and their freedom of
movement restored. Arif Yunus said he believed an open letter
Leyla Yunus sent to the president of Azerbaijan a day earlier about the
arrests of youth activists, entitled “What Are You Afraid of, Mr.
President?” infuriated the authorities and possibly led to her
detention.
Azerbaijan has a long history of using bogus charges to imprison its
critics, including on treason charges, Human Rights Watch said. In the
past two years, Azerbaijani authorities have brought or threatened
unfounded criminal charges against over 40 political activists, journalists, bloggers, and human rights defenders, most of whom are behind bars.
In August 2011, violating a court injunction, the Baku authorities demolished without
warning a building owned by Leyla Yunus as part of a government land
clearance to make way for a park and business area. The building housed
the Institute for Peace and Democracy and two other human rights groups.
Yunus had repeatedly criticized the government’s redevelopment plans for the area.
The crackdown on critical voices continued even as, on May 15,
Azerbaijan took over the rotating chairmanship of the Committee of
Ministers of the Council of Europe, Europe’s foremost human rights body.
“Azerbaijan takes pride in chairing this important regional
institution, yet routinely violates the very values and rights
protections on which it is built and for which it exists,” Denber said.
“The least Azerbaijan’s partners in the Council of Europe can now do is
to urge the government to release Leyla Yunus from pretrial custody and
end its escalating persecution of government critics.”
The French Member of Parliament François Rochebloine raised the persecution and ill-treatment of Leyla Yunus at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on 24 June 2014 in the dialogue with President Ilham Aliyev. “The President’s answer showed he had exact knowledge of the case”, HRHF’s Head of Advocacy Florian Irminger said. HRHF was in Strasbourg with a delegation of Azerbaijani human rights defenders.
Human rights defender Leyla Yunus and her husband Arif Yunus have been arrested on 30 July 2014. Leyla Yunus was sentenced to 3 months pre-trial detention, whilst her husband is under police control and not allowed to leave Baku. We call for Leyla Yunus’ immediate and unconditional release, as we see this as part of the persecution against human rights defenders and activists in Azerbaijan.