Contents – The final cut: How cinema is being used to change the global narrative
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Fears mount over health of Azerbaijani political prisoner
Last month, Ibad Bayramov – son of renowned economist and activist Dr Gubad Ibadoghlu – received a letter from a cardiologist based in the USA warning of an “imminent threat” to his father’s life.
“The cardiologist has recommended that my father has an aortic root aneurysm and must go under surgery as soon as possible,” Bayramov told Index. “The government falsified his medical results during the communications with the ECHR.”
This is just the latest development in the tragic case of the 52-year-old academic Ibadoghlu, who was arbitrarily detained alongside his wife in July 2023 on fabricated charges of producing, acquiring or selling counterfeit money.
The move has been widely condemned as a political one by the Azerbaijani government because of Ibadoghlu’s long history of environmental activism and criticism of the state. Although his wife, Irada Bayramova, was later released, Ibadoghlu still faces charges and is now under house arrest. It means he can’t leave the country to get the medical help he needs.
His son described the harrowing ordeal to Index.
“My parents were brutally physically assaulted and psychologically abused by Azerbaijani police,” he explained. “Our mother had to be hospitalised as a result of the stress she had been going through due to police violence she faced when she was detained.”
Bayramov is one of Ibadoghlu’s three children, all of whom are fighting for their father’s release. He told Index of another man, economist Fazil Gasimov, who had been arrested in the same case and subjected to torture until he testified against Ibadoghlu.
“He was forced to provide false testimony under severe duress, including electroshock torture and having his head submerged in a toilet,” said Bayramov.
“His government-appointed lawyer colluded with the authorities to extract these false statements.”
According to his brother, Gasimov went on a hunger strike in June in protest of the investigation against him and Ibadoghlu.
If convicted of his trumped-up charges, Ibadoghlu – who has had his pre-trial detention extended on three occasions – could face up to 17 years in prison. This would be a shocking miscarriage of justice towards a man who has spent his life fighting for environmental rights and democracy.
Since receiving his PhD in economics from Azerbaijan State University of Economics in 2000, Ibadoghlu has conducted a wide range of research, looking into corruption and money laundering in Azerbaijan as well as petro-authoritarianism and how being oil-rich impedes democracy in post-Soviet nations.
He has previously worked in a number of world-class universities, including Duke University in California and the London School of Economics, and has garnered huge respect in the academic world. A number of academics – alongside several human rights and environmental groups – signed a letter calling for his release which was sent to then-Secretary of State David Cameron in April.
Ibadoghlu’s condition becomes more critical with each passing day. His health, which already had its issues prior to his arrest, has rapidly declined. He has lost 15kg during his time in detention and requires extensive care and possible surgery which Bayramov says is beyond the capabilities of Azerbaijan’s medical system.
“We will try to transfer him to the foreign hospital as soon as possible. However, due to the travel ban he can’t leave the country to get medical assistance,” he said.
Ibadoghlu is currently under house arrest having been moved from detention on 22 April, which his son said is due to pressure on the government over his health.
While under house arrest, Ibadoghlu is prohibited from leaving home between 10pm and 6am or from leaving the capital city of Baku at all. The authorities have to be able to contact him at all times and he has no national ID, therefore cannot register at a hospital.
His trial is currently due on 20 August, but as this date has been pushed back before, Ibadoghlu’s family are wary of getting their hopes up that this saga could end sometime soon.
This is just one of many accusations faced by the Azerbaijan government of violating the human rights of dissenters. On 3 July, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) issued a public statement detailing the refusal of the Azerbaijani authorities to co-operate with them.
In the statement, the CPT said that it “continues to receive allegations of severe acts of ill-treatment and even of torture by police officers” in the state. Such an extraordinary step demonstrates just how alarming the free speech environment in Azerbaijan has become.
The situation Ibadoghlu faces is outrageous but sadly all too common. There is no basis for his arrest, which has been made for purely political reasons. His detainment is a serious miscarriage of justice and an affront to free speech. Given his waning health, his release can’t come a moment too soon.
Julian Assange released: What now?
Index on Censorship has had a close relationship with Julian Assange since he picked up our new media award in 2008 for his work with Wikileaks due to our shared concern for freedom of expression. We were therefore pleased to hear the news that he was finally able to be reunited with his family in Australia after five years in London’s Belmarsh Prison and seven years in hiding at the Ecuadorian embassy (pictured above). At a court in the US Pacific island territory of Saipan, Assange pleaded guilty to a single charge of violating the US Espionage Act. He admitted conspiring to obtain and disclose classified defence documents. Time will tell what chilling effect the deal struck between Assange’s lawyers and the American government will have on journalists attempting to expose future wrongdoing by the US military and intelligence services.
The British courts may have played a decisive role by insisting that Assange’s free expression rights be taken into account during the extradition hearings. But there was a sense that by the end of the proceedings that both sides were exhausted. As Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona said as she announced the agreement: “I hope there will be some peace restored.” For free expression organisations such as Index, the dominant emotion is relief that this saga is finally over.
The unstinting support of our colleagues at Reporters Without Borders has been instrumental in keeping the case in the public eye. But the wider Free Assange campaign has, at times, been a huge distraction. The campaign allowed a whole range of wider questions to arise which were nothing to do with free speech. Was the Wikileaks founder a journalist, an activist or a publisher, for example?
Julian Assange has established his place in history as one of the most significant figures in 21st century journalism. The sheer scale of the leak of US diplomatic cables he helped facilitate forced rival journalists to work together. But it also made governments determined to stop it happening again. New measures in the UK’s new National Security Act, for example, were specifically designed to “modernise” official secrecy legislation in response to Wikileaks-style data dumps. At the same time, authoritarian regimes could always hold up Assange as an example of western hypocrisy when challenged on their human rights records.
The reality is that although the Assange campaign has redefined the way the free speech world works, it has also sucked lots of the air out of it. Julian and Stella Assange have asked for the space to build a life for themselves and their children in Australia. This is their victory. But let us hope that for those of us who care about free expression, the focus can now switch fully to other egregious cases around the world.
In a terrible coincidence, the release of Assange coincided with the beginning of the espionage trial of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in March 2023 shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It also coincided with the case of Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai reaching the highest court of appeal. Lai stands accused of joining an illegal protest in 2019. Next month his trial resumes under separate national security charges.
While we’ve poured energy into campaigning for the release of Assange, there has been a race to the bottom elsewhere in the world. Reporters accused of subversion are held without trial in China’s “black jails”, while hundreds of Uyghur journalists have been imprisoned in the re-education camps of Xinjiang. Russia’s independent media has been eviscerated and President Lukashenka has rounded up any opposition voices in Belarus. The use of anti-terrorist or national security legislation to control journalists has become commonplace in Turkey, in Egypt, in India and across the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
It would be good to think that the energy of the Free Assange campaign could now be harnessed in support of Gershkovich, Lai and the many brave journalists around the world held as spies or subversives whose names we don’t even know.
The long reach: How authoritarian countries are silencing critics abroad
Volume 53.01 Spring 2024