4 August 2023
Azerbaijani labour rights activist Afiaddin Mammadov has been sentenced to 30 days in detention on charges of disobeying police orders. He was allegedly tortured and denied access to a lawyer.
Mammadov, the chair of the Workers’ Table Trade Unions Confederation and a member of the Democracy 1918 Movement, was detained on 1 August and sentenced to administrative detention on Thursday. He began a hunger strike to protest the court’s ruling the same day.
Ahmad Mammadli, the chair of Democracy 1918, a pro-democracy movement, told OC Media on Thursday that Mammadov was tortured while in detention.
This is Mammadov’s third stint in detention on charges of disobeying police in less than a year. The activist maintains his innocence and claims that the authorities are targetting him for his work to promote labour rights.
Mammadli told OC Media that Mammadov was abducted by plainclothes police officers on his way back from a protest organised by delivery couriers.
‘The people who took him were officers of the Baku City Police Department’, said Mammadli, adding that his colleague was denied legal counsel and was tried without a lawyer.
The delivery couriers were protesting a new law that would oblige them to submit a customs declaration on their scooters and mopeds in order to have them registered.
