Azerbaijan cracks down on human rights before hosting European Games

After Azerbaijan was nominated to host the inaugural European Games in 2015, Rasul Jafarov began planning the "Sports for Rights" campaign to draw international attention to political repressions in the oil-rich Caspian Sea country.

However, when thousands of tourists arrive in Baku to attend the opening of the games in June, the Azerbaijani rights activist won’t be there to rain on the parade.

At a hearing last week, Baku’s court of grave crimes sentenced Jafarov to 6½ years in jail on multiple charges including embezzlement, illegal entrepreneurship, tax evasion, and treason. Jafarov denied wrongdoing and claimed the case was politically motivated.

For Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, hosting prestigious international events – from the Eurovision song contest in 2012 to the European Games this year and the Formula One Grand Prix scheduled for 2016 – provides an opportunity to showcase the former Soviet country as a modern, outward-looking state.

Over the last decade, Azerbaijan has poured billions of dollars of its windfall oil revenues into the transformation of Baku from grimy, Soviet era oil-town to glitzy seaside metropolis dubbed by tourist brochures the “pearl of the Caspian”.

Only this week Aliyev – together with his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, who chairs the Azerbaijani committee overseeing preparations for the European Games – attended the opening of a huge stadium that, together with gleaming new aquatics and gymnastics venues, has been installed on Baku’s seafront ahead of the event.

Yet behind the extravagant infrastructure and the promotional razzmatazz lies another reality where critics of the Aliyev regime live in constant fear of the authorities.

The charges against Jafarov were not an isolated case but part of a pattern of repression in Azerbaijan against those expressing dissent, Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, told the European Court of Human Rights early this year. "Reprisals, including judicial harassment against critical voices in general, and those denouncing human rights violations in the country in particular, is a widespread phenomenon in Azerbaijan."

Human rights platform

At the time of his arrest last August, Jafarov was about to launch the “Sports for Rights” that, mirroring the “Sing for Democracy” campaign staged when Baku hosted the Eurovision song contest, aimed to use the European Games as a platform to promote the protection of human rights in Azerbaijan.

A lawyer by training, Jafarov was also working with fellow rights activists Leyla and Arif Yunus to document cases of alleged politically motivated arrests and press for the victims’ release.

Arrested last August after calling for a boycott of the European Games, Leyla Yunus is being held in a pre-trial detention centre in Baku on charges of treason and fraud. Her husband, Arif, has also been taken into custody.

Azerbaijan law enforcers have also tightened the screws on the country’s independent media, forcibly closing the Baku offices of US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and harassing and intimidating reporters and bloggers.

Among the most prominent victims of the crackdown is Khalifa Izmailova, an RFE presenter and freelance investigative journalist, who was arrested in December on charges of inciting a colleague towards suicide. Izmailova was famous for probing corruption cases, including the alleged abuse of power by Azerbaijan’s ruling family.

Many other independent reporters and commentators are paying the price for criticising the authorities and have fled Azerbaijan or gone into hiding, said Kenan Aliyev, a journalist at RFE/RL.

“Azerbaijan wants to silence all dissident voices before the European Games take place,” he said.

Concerns beyond wowing the international sports community are also weighing on policymakers and driving the relentless crackdown on foes of president Aliyev’s regime.

A clutch of giant oilfields offshore of Baku that have driven Azerbaijan’s economic boom over the past decade and lifted almost half of the population out of poverty have begun to decline, underscoring the government’s failure to plan for the post-oil era and build a modern, diversified economy.

Oil price collapse

Less foreseeable than the fall in oil production was the collapse in world energy prices last year that is squeezing budget revenues and raising questions about Azerbaijan’s future as an economically viable state.

As pressure on the country’s finances intensified early this year, Azerbaijan’s central bank abruptly devalued the manat, reducing the value of the national currency by 33.5 per cent against the dollar.

With their savings cut by the devaluation, many people in Azerbaijan are wondering if the massive investment in the European Games was not a “waste of money”, says the RFE’s Kenan Aliyev.