13 August 2024
An Azerbaijani man working at a printing shop which printed posters for the 2023 Soyudlu environmental protests has been sentenced to prison on drug charges.
Joshgun Musayev, 34, was sentenced to three years in prison by the Baku Court of Grave Crimes on 7 August, after having spent over a year in police detention since a protest against environmental damage caused by a goldmine near Soyudlu village in June 2023. Musayev claims that he was framed and that charges brought against him were politically motivated.
Musayev was arrested on 21 June 2023, a day after the protests began, and was taken to a State Security Service (SSS) department in Ganja, where he claims he was offered a choice between being framed for possessing six grammes of drugs or 10 kilogrammes.
During his trial, Musayev stated that he was transferred from Ganja to Baku, where he was forced to take part in a staged drug deal at Narimanov Park filmed by the police.
‘The next morning, I sat [in the park], as I had been instructed, and they filmed from the outside. Later I learned that they had created a scenario to prove that I was allegedly caught in a park in Baku’, he said in court.
He believes the authorities framed him to punish him for printing the posters used by protesters in Soyudlu, which has been under police cordon for over a year. The protests were against both the gold mine’s dumping of acid waste in a nearby artificial lake, which they said was causing severe health issues, and plans to build a second artificial lake to hold additional waste.
Over a hundred protesters took part in the protest in June 2023. They were violently dispersed by Azerbaijani riot police, who deployed tear gas and pepper spray against protesters, including the elderly. Several journalists and residents of the village faced arrest and fines following the incident.
On 5 August, the Azerbaijani Government greenlit the expansion of the artificial lake near Soyudlu.
