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Journalist fined in a midnight trial

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On December 18, journalist Sakhavat Mammad, with an online Yenicag.az website, was fined in a midnight trial, on charges of publishing prohibited information on an information resource or information/communication network under the law on Information, Informatisation and Protection of Information. The journalist was charged under Article 388.1.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses.

Mammad, who often reports on the army, was invited to the Prosecutor General office on December 18 over his recent reporting published on Yenicag.az website. 

“I explained [at the Prosecutor General office] that the recently published work is the result of investigations I have been conducting for a while now. I was then taken to the court. They had a hearing late at night and fined me in the total amount of 500AZN. It was so late that when the judge asked if I wanted a lawyer, I decided to defend myself because I did not want to bother anyone so late in the evening,” Mammad told in an interview with an online news platform Toplum.tv. 

The controversial law on Information, Informatisation, and Protection of Information was first adopted in 1998. In March 2017, a series of restrictive amendments were added to the law, converting the law from a technical regulation into content regulation. In March of 2020, the law was updated yet again. In a previous analysis of the law, AIW together with a legal expert identified some of the key challenges and loopholes in the law, such as: 

  • In the list of prohibited information envisaged in the Law on Information, Informatisation, and Protection of Information, the definition of what entails prohibited content is described with vague expressions that are open to excessive interpretations. With these terms, the state authorities “enjoy” a broad discretion power to categorize any information as prohibited (Law № 460-IQ); 
  • Amendments to an existing bill on Information provisions, Informatization, and Protection of Information extended the subjects – to users – of responsibilities for placement of prohibited information, including the “false information” on information-telecommunication networks.

    This means that amendments establish the liability over the information-telecommunication network users to place prohibited content on the information-telecommunication networks; 

    The amendments also added an item to the list of prohibited content, forbidding the  placement of false information: thus, prohibited information was considered “false information [yalan məlumatlar] in case it posed a threat to harm human life and health, cause significant property damage, mass violation of public safety, disrupt life support facilities, financial, transport, communications, industrial, energy and social infrastructure facilities or other socially dangerous consequences.”

    In other words, if users placed content on the internet that might be considered false information capable to disrupt the functioning of state bodies or their activities it can be considered on the grounds of violating the existing law.

Article 388 of the administrative offenses 

During the same plenary meeting in March 2020, an amendment to article 388-1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (CAO) of Law No. 27-VIQD was also approved.

Article 388-1 of the CAO was aggravated with the penalty of up to one-month administrative detention with other sanctions against real or legal person owners of internet information resources and associated domain names as well as on users of information-telecommunication networks for the placement, or the violation of provisions of the Information Law aiming at preventing the placement, of prohibited information on such internet information resources.

With the amendments introduced to laws, users of the information-telecommunication network, owners of internet information resources, and domain names might be punished under Article 388-1 of the CAO. The penalty for the offense is a fine between 500 and 1000 manats (about US$294–$588) for real persons and 1000 to 1500 manats for officials, with an option of up to one month of administrative detention for both classes of persons depending on the circumstances and the identity of the offender.

During the first year of the pandemic, the same administrative offense was used to target scores of political activists. 

 

Political activist sentenced to ten years in jail

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Member of a political opposition party Agil Humbatov was sentenced to ten years in jail after criticizing the president on Facebook. In a court ruling on November 15, Humbatov was charged with Article 126.2.4 of the Criminal Code – intentionally causing harm with an intent to commit hooliganism. The prosecutor alleged Humbatov, stabbed a man. According to Turan News Agency, the prosecutor said Humbatov stabbed Yaman Mammadov. 

Humbatov was detained on August 11 this year.

In his defense, the political activist, who is a member of Popular Front, said charges against him were bogus. The real reason behind his sentence was his social media posts and videos in which the activist was critical of the government, namely President Ilham Aliyev. 

In his most recent video, Humbatov complained of lack of employment opportunities and that with three children and lack of local government support, he had no other choice but to collect cardboard from waste. 

Previously, Humbatov was confined to treatment at a psychiatric clinic over his criticisms against the authorities online. He was also detained in March 2019 and sentenced to 30 days in administrative detention.

Blogger arrested in Azerbaijan

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Sameddin Mammadov was reported missing on October 29. The witnesses said they saw a group of men, took Mammadov from his in Azerbaijan’s Jalilabad district, driving him in an unidentified direction. His son, Nahid Mammadov said the family learned their father was taken by the police days later. 

Mammadov, is a blogger covering developments from his region via his Facebook account. His son, Nahid Mammadov who spoke with Azadliq Radio, Azerbaijan Service for Radio Liberty said the allegations leveled against his father were illegal and groundless. “My father talked about problems from our district on social media. He was making videos. He was doing it with one purpose – the country’s leadership see what was happening in Jalilabad. My father was intimidated, and warned numerous times.” 

According to the son, his father is currently on a hunger strike. The family in the meantime asked to meet the president but was refused. 

Mammadov is accused of inflicting intentional body harm and hooliganism. Azadliq Radio spoke with the plaintiff, also a resident of the same district, Elshad Jafarov.  Jafarov claims Mammadov, his son, and nephew beat him up on September 27. “I don’t know why Mammadov was arrested. I did not know he was. I cannot say whether he was threatened because of his political activism. But I have testified to the police. I have spent 21 days at a hospital recovering from the beating. There is a forensics report,” Jafarov told Azadliq Radio. 

According to a post on Mammadov’s Facebook, the court dismissed his appeal and that he remains behind bars.  

Toplum TV Facebook page hacked via SMS interception

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On November 3, the founders of Toplum TV, an online news platform, said their Facebook page was hacked. Hackers(s) removed several videos, including one Toplum TV shared yesterday, which was a discussion with an opposition politician Ali Karimli. According to the founders who spoke to AIW, the hacker(s) accessed the page through another founder’s Facebook account, deleted videos, page likes, and changed the name of the page. At the time of reporting this story, the Facebook page was recovered.

In a Facebook post, Alasgar Mammadli, one of the founders of the platform explained in detail how the hacker(s) accessed Toplum TV’s Facebook page by compromising his personal account first.

Translation: This morning at 8.54AM local time, my Facebook account was compromised. The compromise was made possible using my personal mobile phone number. The hacker acquired access to personal information illegally. I only learned about what happened half hour later as I was stuck in city traffic, and had limited access both to my mobile phone and personal computer.  The compromise was made possible by intercepting an SMS sent to my mobile sim card. Meaning, messages sent to my mobile number, were used in parallel by technical supervisors overseeing the telecommunication system in accordance with telecommunication law. Having accessed my personal account [the hacker(s)] were able to access Toplum TV Facebook page, changing its name, [only] deleting archived videos of live debates with Popular Front and Musavat party leaders, and removing several thousand Page likes. Clearly, the reason behind what happened is political intervention. The absolute lack of tolerance to public debates on Toplum TV’s platform has reached such a level, that the perpetrators unafraid, have committed a criminal act prohibited by Articles 271, 272, and 273 of the Criminal Code. This compromise is an act of crime and a grave violation of freedom of speech, privacy, and security of personal data. I demand that serious investigation and preventive action be taken by relevant authorities working within the information security space.

Toplum TV encouraged its readers and followers in a tweet to support their page after hacking:

Translation: Toplum TV’s Facebook page was compromised and its name changed to their name “toplan”. To support independent media, like our Facebook page, and help restore deleted followers.

SMS interceptions are commonly used in Azerbaijan. Below, are a few excerpts from a recent report published by AIW in partnership with International Partnership for Human Rights on the topic: 

The interception of SMS exchanges remains an acute problem in Azerbaijan. In recent years, scores of political activists, journalists, rights defenders, and independent media platforms have had their social media accounts compromised. In many of these cases, those affected have had SMS notification enabled as two-step verification (2FA) procedure for accessing their Facebook accounts. As a result, when their accounts were compromised, they were unable to restore access to the accounts relying on traditional troubleshooting steps offered by social media platforms such as Facebook. Thus, they were unable to retrieve password reset codes sent by Facebook by SMS as their messages were intercepted by the operators, only to be passed on to the relevant government bodies. This experience shows that mobile companies have been involved in many of these attacks. However, none of the operators have taken the blame, so far. The earliest example of SMS surveillance goes back to 2009 when 43 Azerbaijanis voted for Armenia’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest through votes cast by SMS. A number of these people were summoned and questioned by the security services. In an interview with Azadliq Radio (the Azerbaijani service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), one of these televoters, Rovshan Nasirli said that the authorities demanded an “explanation” for his vote and told him it was a “matter of national security”. He told the service: “They were trying to put psychological pressure on me, saying things like: ‘You have no sense of ethnic pride. How come you voted for Armenia?’ They made me write out an explanation, and then they let me go.” The authorities did not deny that they had identified and summoned people who voted for Armenia, and argued that they were merely trying to understand the motives of these people.

Three years after the Eurovision scandal, an investigative documentary aired on Swedish TV called ‘’Mission: Investigate” revealed how the Swedish telecommunications giant TeliaSonera, which at the time owned a majority stake of Azercell, allowed “black boxes” to be installed within their telecommunications networks in Azerbaijan from as early as 2008. These boxes enabled security services and police to monitor all network communication, including internet traffic and phone calls in real-time without any judicial oversight. The exposure of these black boxes explains the type of technology the government was deploying already at the time of Eurovision in 2009. The investigation aired by Swedish TV also confirmed that wiretaps were used as evidence in politically motivated cases.

In 2014, an OCCRP investigation revealed how mobile operators were directly passing on information about their users to the respective government authorities. In a country where the government enjoys unprecedented control over the ICT industry and where some of the key players in the market such as mobile operators and ISPs are affiliated with the government or its officials, the findings of the investigation were not at all surprising. The 2014 investigation quoted the director of the Media Rights Institute, Rashid Hajili as saying that both mobile companies and ISPs were obliged to provide special facilities to the Ministry of National Security (MNS)91 for surveillance purposes in accordance with existing legal provisions as explained earlier. In the case of mobile companies, no court approval was sought to eavesdrop on the conversations and SMS exchanges of their customers – a common practice to this day. One of the first accounts of collaboration between mobile companies and the government is that of journalist Agil Khalil. In 2008, Khalil was working on a story about the alleged involvement of MNS employees in corrupt land deals. After taking photographs for the story, he was approached by MNS agents and beaten. The journalist escaped from his attackers and managed to take photos of them. Khalil filed a complaint with the police, and an investigation was opened but eventually dropped, without the perpetrators having been prosecuted or even identified. Soon after turning to the police, the journalist realized that he was being followed. When he filed another complaint with the police about the surveillance, police again failed to follow up. A few days later, Khalil was subjected to a new attack: this time, an unknown assailant stabbed and injured him. Khalil again turned to the police, accusing both the MNS and the mobile operator Azercell (whose services he was using ) of being responsible for the attack. He argued that the operator had helped the MNS to track down his whereabouts, thereby facilitating the attack. The involvement of Azercell in the case became more evident when the operator provided a local court, which examined the journalist’s complaint, with alleged SMS exchanges between Khalil and a man named Sergey Strekalin, who the MNS claimed was Khalil’s lover and had stabbed the journalist out of jealousy. When Khalil’s lawyer requested access to these SMS exchanges, Azercell refused, which called into question the authenticity of these messages. Khalil left Azerbaijan the same year after another attempted attack against him and the continued failure of the authorities to hold his assailants accountable. He took his case to the ECtHR, as a result of which the Azerbaijani government made a so-called unilateral declaration (an official admission) before this court in 2015 that it had violated Khalil’s right to life, freedom from ill-treatment, and freedom of expression and agreed to pay 28 000 EUR in compensation to him. As the government made this admission, there was no ECtHR ruling on the case.

In September, Toplum TV reported it lost 16k followers on its Facebook page. Facebook failed to explain how and why this took place. 

In Azerbaijan, one man sentenced to ten months over a series of tweets

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The 35-year-old resident of Nakhchivan was arrested in April, 2021. He was charged with Article 148 of the Ciminal Code (slander or insult using fake accounts on internet information services). In June, the Nakhchivan City Court sentenced the user to ten months.  According to Azerbaijan Service for Radio Liberty reporting, the same court, reviewed the motion filed against the court’s June decison on October 24. In its ruling, the court decided to replace the sentence with a fine. Taking into account, the time spent behind bars since April, the court then also ruled to remove the fine. 

The man, whose name is only identified by his initials, K.M., was jailed over a series of tweets from 2020, targeting the head of the Supreme Assembly of the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, Vasif Talibov. 

AIW was unable to verify the tweets. Only two tweets with the same text appeared in search results. Both belonged to two different users. 

This is the first case where a user of social media platform, was arrested and then jailed explicitly over a text posted online and specifically on Twitter. Previously reported cases of harassment and initimidation of online activists, including detentions and/or arrests were justified with other offenses listed under the Criminal Code. Most common charges are hooliganism, disobeying authority, and drug posession. 

Azerbaijan renames main Internet regulator [update May 24]

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On October 11, the main internet regulator in Azerbaijan – the Ministry for Transport, Communication and High Technologies – was renamed the Ministry of Digital Development and Transport. The move comes following the signing of a Presidential Order that includes “improving management in the field of digitalization, innovation, high technology and communication in Azerbaijan,” according to ABC.az reporting. 

The decree also orders the setting up of the following departments within the rebranded ministry: 

  • The Agency for Information Communication Technologies; 
  • Innovation and Digital Development Agency (which will now combine, National Nuclear Research Center, Innovation Agency, and High Technologies Research Center);

Under its responsibilities, the Agency for Information Communication Technologies will:

  • carry out certification, accounting, control, and regulation of information communication technologies (including quality control) – this means that the new agency will act as the main internet regulator from now on; 

Experts say, the newly set up internet regulator, is unlikely to act independently. Human rights lawyer, Emin Abbasov said, “For many years, regulation in this sector [ICT] belonged to the Ministry [of Transport, Communication, and High Technologies]. And it has been a long-awaited move to set up an independent internet regulatory body. However, the new agency is unlikely to act independently as its head will be appointed by the Minister of Digital Development and Transport.”

Similarly, commenting on the decision, the President of Azerbaijan Internet Forum, Osman Gunduz said while it is a good sign that there is a new agency, its autonomy from its predecessor is yet to be seen. “For many years, the Ministry was the regulator. Basically, the ministry was regulating the ICT market, in which it also had stakes. There was a department within the ministry responsible for regulations and for decades this department favored government operators by creating favorable conditions for them. So it is a positive step that there is now a separate agency. What is interesting however is that according to the order, the head of the Agency will be appointed by the Minister [of Digital Development and Transport]. It would have been better if it was the President. Because it is unlikely that the Agency is going to have it easy regulating a deeply embedded tradition and creating equal conditions for both state and private companies. The question we should be asking is whether the leadership of the agency will have the authority and say in regulating the state operator in accordance with the new rules and procedures? And whether yet again, state companies will hold an upper hand in the market?  

In Azerbaijan, the ICT market is fairly concentrated in the hands of the government – in terms of control, and regulation as well as services – namely the Ministry of Transport, Communication, and High Technologies. In 2016, the President approved a Strategic Roadmap for Telecommunication and Information Technology Development. According to item seven, titled “strategic goals,” the document called for setting up an independent regulatory body by 2020.

On May 24, according to changes to a presidential decree dated January 12, 2018, the Ministry’s name was changed once again to the Ministry of Digital Development and Transport.

Azerbaijan blocks access to Pro-Iran websites – multiple reports

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As of October 23, Azerbaijan blocked access to a number of pro-Iran websites. The decision follows a rift in diplomatic ties between Azerbaijan and Iran over the course of the past two months. 

According to IranIntl website, Azerbaijan blocked access to these websites to prevent Iranian and religious propaganda.  

The blocking was first reported by journalist Elchin Alioglu via Facebook page. Alioglu also said that access to the religious video series spreading Iranian propaganda on YouTube was also blocked.  

In Azerbaijan journalist gets 15 days in prison over a Facebook post

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Anar Abdulla was sentenced to 15 days in prison over a Facebook post, according to OC Media reporting. But the charges pressed against the journalist accuse Abdulla of hooliganism and disobeying the police – the most common charges used against civic activists in Azerbaijan.

On September 14, Abdulla wrote a short post on his personal Facebook profile accusing the heads of administrative offices, of deceiving President Ilham Aliyev, while the people pay the price for it.

According to OC Media, the journalist was summoned to the police on October 5 for a “preventive conversation” however Abdulla was handcuffed and detained. The hearing that took place on October 6, where the journalist was sentenced to 15 days was closed to the local press. 

Speaking to OC Media, Abdulla’s lawyer, Zibeyda Sadigova, said, her client denied both charges. During the hearing, police alleged that the journalist disobeyed police orders and used profane language against the officers. Police pressed charges against the journalist as a result.  

In addition to hooliganism and disobeying police, politically motivated criminal charges used against civil society representatives include drug possession and illegal business activity. 

Journalist from an online TV channel beaten

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On September 28, Avaz Hafizli, a journalist from an online news platform Kanal13 was harassed and beaten by the local security guards while covering the opening of a new restaurant in the capital of Baku. 

Hafizli, arrived at the opening of Deyirman restaurant but was quickly stopped by the security guards. According to reporting by Turan News Agency, Hafizli asked the security guards to confirm whether the newly opened restaurant indeed belonged to the head of Yasamal administrative district, a government official and why ordinary citizens were not allowed in   

Hafizli was live-streaming the encounter but the stream ended abruptly after the security guard resorted to violence. 

The journalist told Turan News Agency that he was taken inside the garden of the restaurant where after guards’ attempt to bribe him, the exchange turned violent. 

Hafizli called for help and managed to call the police. At the police station, the two sides wrote their individual statements but even there, Hafizli told Turan News Agency the restaurant representative kept threatening the journalist. 

The following day, Hafizli went to a hospital where after a medical check-up he was told that his arm was broken. 

The journalist complained to the Ministry of the Interior asking for an investigation and due punishment in the case of the perpetrators of the attack and the subsequent injury. 

Kanal 13 is an online video news platform broadcasting from its YouTube channel to its close to a million subscribers. The channel was created in 2008. 

In 2014, Kanal 13 was subject to a government launched an investigation that was targeting all independent, international, and opposition civil society organizations, including organizations as IREX and Kanal 13. At the time, the manager and founder of the channel Anar Orucov (brother of Aziz Orucov) were in charge of the office and the channel.

As part of the country-wide crackdown, Kanal 13 office was searched, documents confiscated. Fearing persecution, Anar Orucov fled the country with his family with the support of an international organization while Aziz Orucov stayed behind to continue managing the channel and the projects.

Kanal 13 has also been subject to online attacks. In March of 2017, a report released by Amnesty International, “False Friends- how fake accounts and crude malware targeted dissidents in Azerbaijan” detailed how Kanal 13 was among those targeted when its internal communications were accessed for over a week.

Two months later, the channel’s director Aziz Orucov was detained and later rearrested while the office of the channel was searched and equipment was confiscated.

On February 11, 2020, a suspended sentence against Aziz Orucov, editor of the platform, was dropped by the Baku Court of Appeal.

Orucov was arrested during the criminal investigations against non-governmental organizations in Azerbaijan. He was arrested in 2017, but released in 2018 on a suspended sentence. The sentence was until February 2021.

Orucov took over the managing of the platform after his brother Anar Orucov fled the country in 2014 amid threats of persecution.

The platform’s website kanal13.tv is on the list of blocked websites according to the most recent OONI measurements. 

Earlier in September Hafizli reportedly chained himself to the gate of the Prosecutor General’s Office. The action was taken in protest of government inaction against homophobic incitement by blogger Sevinj Huseynova, whose recent videos in which the blogger openly calls for violence against trans community members have gone viral. Hafizli who is a member of the LGBTQI+ community in Azerbaijan attempted suicide on September 5 as a result of Huseynova’s videos. 

inauthentic pages target independent news platform – will Facebook take notice [part 3, the case of Azadliq Radio]

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After The Guardian’s expose on Facebook overlooking trolling activity in Azerbaijan (and elsewhere) earlier this year, one would think that the platform would finally take notice and address how the platform is abused by trolls and the actors operating them. Instead, the loopholes remain and from the looks of it, the platform is doing little to address the use of Facebook Pages – at least in the case of Azerbaijan as pointed out here and here – to target independent media. The most recent example is this Facebook post, shared by Azerbaijan Service for Radio Liberty. The post, is a caricature by Gunduz Aghayev, addressing the rising cost of fuel in the country. Under the post, 549 comments to be exact claim all sorts of things – that the radio is biased, is lying, the economy is doing great, that the State Oil Company (SOCAR) knows exactly what it’s doing, etc. A closer look at the comments reveals that each belongs to a user operating a fake Facebook page. Earlier this month, AIW reported about Azerbaijan’s very own troll factory. 

Will Facebook take notice this time? 

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