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Azerbaijan charges prominent rights activist with treason

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  • Azerbaijan charges prominent rights activist with treason

    Global Post
    July 30 2014


    Azerbaijan charges prominent rights activist with treason


    Prominent Azerbaijani human rights activist Leyla Yunus was charged
    Wednesday with treason, her lawyer Dzhavad Dzhavadov said.

    The award-winning campaigner was also charged with tax evasion,
    large-scale fraud and falsifying documents.

    Her husband Arif, an independent political analyst, was also charged
    with treason and fraud, Dzhavadov added.

    Earlier in the day Yunus was bundled into a car in the courtyard of
    her apartment building in Baku and taken away by three plain-clothes
    men, family spokesman Yusif Agayev said.

    A fierce critic of Azerbaijan's poor rights record, Yunus is head of
    one of Azerbaijan's leading rights groups, the Institute for Peace and
    Democracy in Baku.

    She was detained and questioned for several hours in April.

    Yunus has long worked with Armenian activists advocating the
    reconciliation of the two countries, which have been locked in a
    decades-long conflict over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh region.

    She has won several foreign prizes and honours for her work.

    Any display of dissent in Azerbaijan is usually met with a tough
    government response.

    Rights groups say the government has been clamping down on opponents
    since President Ilham Aliyev's re-election last year.

    Aliyev, 52, secured a third term in October polls -- seen as flawed by
    international observers -- extending his family's decades-long grip on
    power in the tightly controlled Caspian Sea nation.

    He first took power in 2003 following a disputed election after the
    death of his father Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB officer and
    communist-era leader. (AFP)

    http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140730/azerbaijan-charges-prominent-rights-activist-treason

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