Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Centre (EMDS) prepared this report on the situation of human rights in Azerbaijan covering the year 2019 based on publicly available and alternative sources of information.
EMDS is a non-profit organization promoting human rights and democracy in Azerbaijan. Annual summary of human rights violations
Annual summary of human rights violations
In 2019, no significant progress has been monitored in the advancement of the protection of human rights and lack of political will remained as one of the main reasons. Throughout the year, EMDS has collected information on 1679 human rights violations over 1180 facts. Though, the number of political prisoners – just over 100 – decreased in the end of the year in comparison with the start of the year, only few political prisoners got released and politically motivated detentions continued all along the year. The right fair trial and social security rights stand as the most violated rights, the restrictive political and legal measures on the activities of the civil society organizations have not been lifted, human rights lawyers taking politically sensitive cases remained under pressure by authorities. The situation of the removal of travel bans of civil society activists and journalists became relatively improved where several previously banned people are free now to travel abroad, however, there are few new faces in the list as well. Nonetheless, the amount of information on human rights violations available to collect should not be translated as the rest of the rights are violated less or none.
For the full report, download the file here.
