The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has fined Azerbaijan €29,500 ($34,000) for violating the right to freedom of expression of the Azadlig newspaper, and imposing monetary sanctions on it.
The court issued its ruling on Tuesday, more than 13 years after Azadlig lodged its complaint in August 2013.
The case concerned Azerbaijan’s ‘allegedly disproportionate and unjustified interference’ with the newspaper’s right to freedom of expression, and the imposition of monetary sanctions on it for publishing an article ‘found to be defamatory’ of the CEO of the state-owned Baku Metro, Taghi Ahmadov, whom the court identified only as T.A.
Azadlig was a daily that had been in circulation since 1989, but stopped publishing its paper version in 2016 due to financial difficulties.
The case summary noted that Azadlig had, in April 2012, published an article stating that Ahmadov had ‘misappropriated five gopiks’ by increasing the the price of a metro fare from ₼0.15 (then $0.09) to ₼0.20 (then $0.16).
According to the court, the article noted that following the increase in fares, ₼0.05 (then $0.04), or five gopiks, remained on the balances of passengers’ metro cards.
‘In fact, it continued like this for three months. Each time I added one manat to my card, the machine displayed the balance as one manat and five gopiks’, the ECHR quoted the article. ‘In April, one manat did not turn into one manat and five gopiks. Five gopiks had been… stolen. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have been pickpocketed. This is a new time of fraud’.
The author then wrote that if at least 250,000 metro cards, then ₼12,500 ($9,800) would have been ‘misappropriated’ by the authorities.
According to the ECHR, Ahmadov lodged a defamation claim against Azadlig in May 2012, demanding that the newspaper retract its article and pay him ₼200,000 (then $160,000). In June of that year, the Yasamal District Court upheld Ahmadov’s claim and ordered Azadlig to publish a retraction and pay ₼30,000 (then $23,586). The newspaper appealed against the decision, but had their appeal dismissed by the Baku Court of Appeal in September 2012. This case made it to the Supreme Court, which in February 2013 upheld all previous judgements.
The ECHR ordered the Azerbaijani government to pay the newspaper €25,000 ($29,000) in pecuniary damages, €3,000 ($3,500) in non-pecuniary damages, and €1,500 ($1,700) in additional costs.
It is unclear whether Baku will oblige the court’s decision.
In April, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev stated that ‘if Azerbaijan could not participate in the election of judges for the ECHR, then it would consider all ECHR decisions to be invalid’.
Aliyev’s speech was a response to a January 2024 decision by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) not to approve the credentials of the Azerbaijani delegation, citing Baku’s failure to fulfill its basic obligations as a member of the Council of Europe.
In May, Human rights lawyer Fariz Namazli told the independent media outlet Toplum TV that from March, the Azerbaijan government had stopped paying out compensation due from ECHR decisions.
Aytan Farhadova
