“After the abolishment of the state registration of the Election Monitoring Center (EMC) by the Khatai District Court on 14 May 2008, the website http://www.emc-az.org , belonging to EMC was blocked,” Mammedli informed the IRFS. “After this, I opened the website http://www.smm-az.org in my own name. However, twice already I have gone to open my site, only to find that it is blocked. The site is blocked only in Azerbaijan. Therefore, I sent an information request to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to determine the cause of the block within Azerbaijan.

It was noted in the registration information that the site www.smm-az.org does not belong to an individual person, but to the organization ‘EMC-Azerbaijan’, according to the chief of the information community development department of the ministry, R.Gulmemmedov. After this response I reviewed the registration of the website and I got the information from the server that
the site belonged to me.”

Subsequently, Mammedli once again appealed to the ministry demanding that the website be unblocked in Azerbaijan. However, the ministry declared that the limitation of the entrance to the site www.smm-az.org was carried out on the basis of the Khatai District Court’s May 2008 decision. Because www.smm-az.org is registered to Mammedli personally, and not an organisation, Mammedli has now appealed to the court, demanding that his website be unblocked.