By Emma HartleyPublished: 3:52PM BST 01 Sep 2009
Two Azerbaijani bloggers face up to five years in prison for posting a video on YouTube of a donkey giving a press conference.
Adnan, Hajizade, 26, and Emin Milli, 29, posted the satirical video, which has English subtitles, in a send-up of Azerbaijani government and media.
The video is tame by Western standards. Yet shortly after the video was released Mr Hajizade and Mr Milli were arrested after a scuffle at a restaurant in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, and are being held under a two-month pre-trial detention order.
Isakhan Ashurov, the pair’s lawyer, said: “This incident is definitely politically motivated. My clients did not beat anybody. Quite the opposite.”
According to Amnesty International’s website, the two young men were discussing online activism when two well-built men were said to have approached their group, demanded that they stop talking about politics, and assaulted Mr Milli and Mr Hajizade.
The assault reportedly resulted in injuries to them, including the breaking of Mr Hajizade’s nose and injury to Mr Milli’s leg.
They went to the police to lodge a complaint. However, rather than allowing them to do so, the police detained first Mr Hajizade and then Mr Milli when the latter reportedly refused to leave the police station without his fellow activist.
Both are said to have been charged with “hooliganism carried out by a group of people”, which carries up to five years’ imprisonment.
The alleged assailants were reportedly discharged.
Azerbaijan is a secular presidential republic, which got its independence from the former USSR in 1991.
It is it is bounded by the Caspian sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the north-west, Armenia to the west, and Iran to the south.
Reporters without Borders, a Paris-based organisation, released a statement saying that the decision to hold the bloggers was “disproportionate” and “typical of arbitrary judicial decisions taken with government opponents”.
The UN’s human rights committee also raised concerns about the arrests and issued a statement condemning “extensive limitations to the right to freedom of expression in Azerbaijan”.
Although Azerbaijan is nominally a representative democracy and is a member of the UN's Human Rights Council, recent elections were contested and abuses of civil rights and freedom of the press are frequently reported.
The 2008 Freedom in the World report by US-based Freedom House, which tries to measure democracy and political freedom, labeled Azerbaijan a “not free country”. Freedom House was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1941.
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