Your Excellency:
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about
two libel lawsuits that have been filed by a senior government official
against Elmar Huseynov, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Baku-based,
independent magazine Monitor.
These lawsuits are the latest actions in a 7-year-old campaign of official
harassment targeting Huseynov and the Monitor in retaliation
for criticizing government policies and senior political officials,
including Your Excellency.
Hasan Zeynalov, the head of the Baku-based Representative Office of
the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, an Azerbaijani exclave located between
Armenia and Iran, filed both civil and criminal libel lawsuits against
Huseynov on January 25.
Zeynalov filed the lawsuits in response to a biting commentary written
by Huseynov and published in the January 18 edition of Monitor
that criticized the prevalence of corruption in Azerbaijan. In the article,
Huseynov compared the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic and its residents
to Sicily and also compared Azerbaijan's government to the Sicilian
mafia.
Zeynalov is seeking 100 million manats (US$20,000) in damages from Huseynov
in a civil case. Huseynov also faces up to 2.5 million manats (US$500)
in fines and 6 months in jail on criminal charges. The Sabail District
Court in Baku has scheduled a hearing for the case on March 4.
Zeynalov filed the lawsuit on behalf of the residents of Nakhchivan.
But Rashid Hajili, director of the Baku-based Institute for Media Defense,
Education, and Advocacy (IDEA), told CPJ that the case against Huseynov
is flawed because the Azerbaijani legal system does not allow individuals
to file lawsuits on behalf of others.
Huseynov has been targeted with legal harassment for several years.
In July 2002 a Baku court found Huseynov and Eynulla Fetullayev, a reporter
for Monitor, guilty of defamation for publishing a critical first-person
account written by Fetullayev about his experience serving in the military.
The court ordered the two men to pay a hefty fine and to publish a retraction
of the article. Following the conviction, Monitor was unable
to appear on newsstands because the state printing house and private
printers refused to publish the magazine, "citing an order from above,"
said Huseynov.
In September 2001, another one of Huseynov's publications, the independent
weekly Bakinsky Bulvar, was closed after the Baku mayor won a
defamation lawsuit against the paper. Following the closure, the court
launched criminal proceedings against Huseynov for defaming the mayor
and sentenced him to six months in prison. Huseynov served almost a
month of his term before he was released in October 2001 by a presidential
pardon in honor of the 10th anniversary of Azerbaijan's independence.
Government persecution of Huseynov continued after he created Monitor
in 1996. The magazine was closed in 1998 after authorities confiscated
copies of the magazine from Baku vendors and sued Huseynov for defaming
the Azeri people in an article titled "The Azerbaijani Nation in the
21st Century." Huseynov lost the lawsuit, and the publication was suspended.
The magazine resumed publishing in 2000 under the name Monitor Weekly,
but Justice Ministry officials threatened to close it unless Huseynov
published an apology for the 1998 Monitor article. In April 2000,
tax inspectors closed the printing company where the magazine was produced
and later allowed it to reopen after it promised to cease printing Monitor
Weekly. In May 2000, tax inspectors sealed the magazine's Baku
offices for alleged tax violations. Later that month, in response to
the complaint of a private company that accused the magazine of "propagating
false information" about the business, Azerbaijan's Economic Court suspended
publication of Monitor Weekly. In June, Monitor Weekly
journalists broke the seals on the office and returned to work.
In September 2000, Huseynov was informed that the court had revoked
Monitor Weekly's license, and the magazine was forced to suspend
publication. The court allegedly handed down the judgment at a July
17, 2000, hearing held at the request of the Prosecutor's Office. Because
Huseynov did not receive the ruling until almost two months later, he
was unable to appeal the judgment within the required 10 days of the
date of the ruling. No one from the magazine's editorial office was
advised of the July 17 hearing. (The magazine resumed publishing under
its original name, Monitor, in April 2002.)
Based on this long-standing pattern of state-sponsored persecution and
our research into the recent lawsuits filed against Huseynov, CPJ believes
that Zeylanov is using Azerbaijan's libel laws to silence Huseynov and
Monitor for criticizing government policies and the prevalence
of corruption in Azerbaijan. As the leaders of your country, you and
other senior government officials are at the center of public debate
and must tolerate public scrutiny.
Journalists should never be criminally prosecuted for reporting on matters
of public interest. Moreover, independent and opposition journalists
cannot fulfill their role of reporting and commenting on the news as
long as criminal defamation statues remain on the books.
As an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending the
rights of our colleagues worldwide, CPJ calls on Your Excellency to
do everything within your power to ensure that Zeylanov withdraws his
lawsuits and that the politically motivated harassment of Elmar Huseynov
and Monitor ceases immediately. We also urge you to work toward
eliminating criminal defamation statutes from Azerbaijani law.
Thank you for your attention to these urgent matters. We await your
reply.
Sincerely,
Joel Simon
Acting Director
