Submission to the Committee of Ministers by prominent NGOs on the implementation of the Mammadli Group of cases highlights new arbitrary detentions in Azerbaijan
On 8 August 2024, NGOs with a long-standing engagement on Azerbaijan and well-established legal authority submitted information to the Committee of Ministers on the continued nature of repression affecting the applicants of the Mammadli Group of cases of the European Court of Human Rights. The government of Azerbaijan has yet to fully execute the requested measures by the Court. The arrest of Anar Mammadli serves to illustrate the extent to which Azerbaijan remains distant from the implementation of the Court’s rulings.
In their submission, the NGOs call for full rehabilitation to be “ensured in respect of all the applicants [of the Mammadli Group of cases] by quashing all the applicants’ convictions, clearing their criminal records and restoring their civil and political rights through the acquittal verdicts”.
As the coalition writes in its submission, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe “is well aware of the punitive criminal prosecution of Azerbaijani human rights defenders, journalists and activists during the so called 2014 civil society crackdown, with a number of them being applicants in the Mammadli Group of cases. Since 2022, a new wave of retaliatory persecutions emerged, which has particularly intensified in November 2023, resulting in arbitrary arrests and detentions of journalists and activists on trumped up charges, as set out below. Many of these charges relate to ‘Western funds’ allegedly smuggled into the country, which is similar to the context within which the 2014 crackdown took place. The local civil society calls it the largest ever wave of repression of the civil society since Azerbaijan’s accession to the Council of Europe.”
This submission provides an update on the most recent domestic developments relevant to both individual and general measures in this Group of cases, including information on the situation of Anar Mammadli who faces new retaliatory trumped-up charges and likely criminal conviction with aggravated circumstances due to his currently still standing previous conviction that has not been quashed to date. The section on general measures focuses on two issues: a) a new wave of retaliatory prosecution and misuse of criminal law against journalists, human rights defenders and other Government critics, and b) the issue of independence of the judiciary.
It is also reminded that the Committee of Ministers itself reiterated its previous calls, in which it has “expressed profound concern that no information has been provided on the outcome of the long-awaited domestic court judgments in which the European Court found to have been the result of misuse of criminal law intending to punish and silence them, still stand”. The Committee urged Azerbaijani authorities to promptly annul the convictions of remaining seven applicants, clear their criminal records, restore their full civil and political rights, and called for restitutio in integrum, emphasizing the joint responsibility of all competent authorities to provide updates, including timelines for the quashing of the convictions.
The signatory organisations of this 9.2 Rule submission are Free Voices Collective, Independent Lawyers Network, European Human Rights Advocacy Centre and International Partnership of Human Rights.
About the Mammadli Group of cases
The Mammadli Group of cases consists of seven applicants who are prominent human rights defenders, civil society leaders, and a journalist. They were all subjected to arrests and detentions in 2013-2016, which the European Court found to constitute a misuse of criminal law, intended to punish and silence them for their human rights and journalistic activities. As underlined in the submission, the Court also “established that these cases reflected a troubling pattern of arbitrary arrests and detentions of government critics, civil society activists and human rights defenders through retaliatory prosecutions and misuse of criminal law in defiance of the rule of law, and the actions of the State gave rise to a risk of further repetitive applications (Aliyev v Azerbaijan, § 223).”
The Mammadli Group of cases is hence emblematic of the repression targeting civil society and media in Azerbaijan, and the way in which law was designed to target lawyers, human rights defenders, civil society leaders, and journalists and media workers.
» Judgements constituing the Mammadli Group
» Committee of Ministers interim resolution deploring absence of progress on the execution of the Mammadli Group cases, 11 March 2021
» Analysis on the impact of infringement proceedings in relation to the Mammadli Group of cases, by Toby Collis, Lawyer at the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre, 28 May 2021
About the Rule 9.2 submissions
Under Rule 9 of the Committee of Ministers for the supervision of the execution of judgments (view the Rules), National Human Rights Institutions and civil society organisations may submit to the Committee of Ministers communications with regard to the execution of judgments.
Such submissions are typically made ahead of a Committee of Ministers Human Rights meeting, at which the concerned case(s) is to be considered.
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