3 August 2024
Georgian authorities have detained Azerbaijani journalist Afgan Sadigov and have scheduled a hearing for his extradition.
Sadigov, the head of the independent Azerbaijani news outlet and YouTube channel Azel.TV, was detained on Saturday, less than a month after he was barred from leaving Georgia unless he travels to Azerbaijan.
Sadigov had been living in Georgia with his family since December 2023.
[Read more: Azerbaijani journalist ‘barred from leaving Georgia’]
His wife, Sevinj Sadigova, posted footage of him being escorted into a car by law enforcement officers.
She told OC Media that Sadigov had been followed by unknown people when they lived in Marneuli. The Sadigovs moved to Tbilisi after border guards refused to allow Sadigov board a plane to Antalya on 17 July.
She believes that Sadigov was detained on the orders of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and that her husband will be detained should he be extradited to Azerbaijan.
Dmitry Nozadze, a lawyer from Rights Georgia, told OC Media that Baku requested Sadigov's extradition in July, and that he was accused of fraud or extortion in Azerbaijan.
His wife, Sadigova, has dismissed the accusations levelled against her husband as ‘absurd’.
As news broke of Sadigov’s detention, several Georgian journalists held a protest outside Georgia’s Interior Ministry building, along with Sadigov’s wife and two children.
‘We did not feel safe’
Nozadze said that the Georgian authorities had scheduled an extradition trial for Sadigov on Sunday, adding that the trial could ‘drag on for about three months’.
In 2016, Sadigov was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on charges of aggravated assault, with the sentence later reduced by a year.
He was later arrested in 2019 and sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of extortion. The sentence was reduced to four years after a presidential pardon in May 2022.
In late July, Sadigov told OC Media that he had made the decision to move to Georgia because he and his family did not feel safe in Azerbaijan.
‘Living in Georgia was not easy for me, because here, at the same time, I felt someone following me, and many times I received threatening messages’, said Sadigov.
Azerbaijan’s government has been cracking down on independent media in the country since November 2023, with at least 10 journalists currently remaining imprisoned, in what is recognised by international rights and media organisations as political persecution.
[Read more: Editorial | Ilham Aliyev’s attempt to eradicate the free press cannot succeed]
Over the past few years, many Azerbaijani journalists have chosen to live and work in exile for fear of persecution in Azerbaijan. However, concerns have long been mounting about how safe they are in Georgia.
Such concerns became particularly acute after an Azerbaijani journalist, Afghan Mukhtarli, who was based in Tbilisi, was kidnapped and delivered to Azerbaijan in 2017, allegedly by the Georgian authorities.
