Azerbaijan / Europe & Central Asia

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the recent police assault on two journalists from the Baku daily Bu gun and by the subsequent raid on the newspaper’s editorial office. This is the second incident during the past month in which Azeri police have attacked local journalists, suggesting a pattern of gross abuse of authority and reckless disregard for press freedom in your country.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by the recent closure of the Baku-based magazine Monitor Weekly and by your continued refusal to review the legality of the Interior Ministry’s October 1999 takeover of the independent station Sara Radio/TV.

Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in AZERBAIJAN. New York, May 4, 2000 – Seventeen journalists were beaten by police while covering an opposition demonstration on April 29 in the capital city of Baku, according to the Journalists’ Trade Union and other sources in Azerbaijan.

[Click here to read CPJ’s April 7 protest letter.] [Click here for a map of Nagorno-Karabakh].

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply disturbed by your government’s recent crackdown on the Baku-based magazine Monitor Weekly and the continued harassment of its editor in chief, Elmar Huseynov.

By Chrystyna Lapychak Wars in Yugoslavia and Chechnya dominated regional and international headlines in 1999. The conflicts raised the journalists’ death toll in the region and prompted crackdowns, as governments blocked access to war zones and engaged in propaganda campaigns.

Azerbaijani press groups have proposed that August 6, 1998, the day that censorship was officially abolished, be declared Press Freedom Day. The move may be premature. While conditions have improved notably since then, journalists still must contend with lawsuits and threats of violence. The 1998 presidential decree that abolished censorship also dismantled Glavlit, the Soviet-era…

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is greatly disturbed by your government’s sustained and often violent harassment of the opposition newspaper Yeni Musavat and the independent station Sara Radio/TV.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is greatly disturbed by the pressure your government has exerted on the independent television station ANS to block it from airing an interview with a Chechen rebel leader.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is greatly concerned by the Azerbaijani parliament’s December 9 adoption of a new media law that severely restricts press freedom in your country. Although the new law formally forbids censorship, it outlines several provisions that limit the internationally-recognized right of journalists to practice their profession. The legislation: