PACE holds hearings on human rights in Azerbaijan, latter points at Karabakh as more serious issue

“There are indeed political prisoners in Azerbaijan: 1 million refugees and internally displaced persons who appeared as a result of the Armenian invasion of my country,” said Samad Seyidov, the head of the Azerbaijani delegation to the Parliament Assembly of the Council of Europe earlier today.

He added that without the resolution of this problem, it will be very difficult to “solve the problem of political prisoners”, reports Turan.

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Hearings on the issue of political prisoners in Azerbaijan were organized by the PACE Monitoring and Legal Committee during its spring session of PACE in Strasbourg, France.

According to the head of the committee on legal issues and human rights Torhildur Barsdottir, the March amnesty, in which dozens of political prisoners were released, did not solve the problem.

About 70 political prisoners remain in prison. Moreover, some of the recently released prisoners were again arrested, and again for political reasons.

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Azerbaijani human rights activist and political émigré Leyla Yunus and the leader of the opposition Republican Alternative party Ilgar Mammadov also spoke.

Both of them spent several years in prison for political reasons, and in their speeches they spoke about how acute this problem is in the country.

Samad Seyidov said that Yunus and Mammadov are pursuing their own political interests, and therefore cannot be objective.