Main highlights of what happened in the House
After the opening, the House has hosted a series of events organized by different local NGOs, including round tables of the youth organizations to mobilize after the University massacre in April, round table discussions, presentations of movies, books, CD of songs, press conferences.
All these events focused on pressure on free expression, human rights activists, arrest of journalists. Many of these events are large-scale where between 40-70 people participate. These events were mainly organized by Youth Committee of Azerbaijan Popular Front, the Association for Protection of Women Rights, Center for Humanitarian Society Research, Institute for Peace and Democracy, Media Rights Centre, Independent Writers’ Union, Social Workers’ Union, American Bar Association, Education and Progress Society, Azerbaijan UN Association, Learning Democracy Social Union, etc.
Some statistics on the use of the House
All in all, in 8 months period of its functioning the House hosted 39 events. In all these events 805 people, including 293 women and 502 men participated.
There were also individual visits by citizens to seek legal assistance on different cases of violation of their rights. These visitors were provided with the details of the organizations where they could get the required assistance. The number of such visits was 29.
The heads and/or representatives of different local organizations also visited the House: (a) to introduce themselves; (b) to seek opportunities for co-operation; (c) to learn more on the aims and mission of the House.
Freedom of expression cases
In November 2009 Azerbaijan again reached the highest number of imprisoned journalists in the OSCE area. 2 journalists were sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and 1 journalist was sentenced to six months’ suspended imprisonment and two online media journalists were sentenced to six months and one year of corrective labor respectively for defamation in October.
In July 2 young bloggers Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli (Abdullayev) were arrested under article 221.2.1 (hooliganism) of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
The bloggers were arrested after being beaten up at a restaurant. While reporting the incident to the police, they were detained. On 11 November the young bloggers were found guilty under the indictment of hooliganism and a verdict was issued to imprison them. IRFS declares that although the young bloggers were accused of hooliganism, they were slandered and arrested for placing critical material about the government on the internet.
Looking ahead: perspectives and challenges
Establishment of the House proved to be a well-decided initiative as the pressure on human rights activists increases which limits them to find venues for their different events. As such, the request for booking the press center of the House for different events increases, including requests from the organizations that function in different regions of Azerbaijan. This is a good sign for the usefulness of the House. However, it is also discouraging that the pressure on the human rights defenders and organizations increases and their choices for event venues gets more limited. This makes it a real challenge for the House as it is impossible to host more than 2 events a day.
The House will also have a library which will start operating in mid-January.
It will be open to public where besides having an access to the books on different human rights issues in 3 languages (Azerbaijani, English and Russian), the visitors will have an access to internet. The books so far have been donated by Center for Humanitarian Society Research and Women’s Alliance on the Struggle for Civil Society.
2010 is the year for Parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan. As such, the year is very challenging for the House, as well as human rights community in Azerbaijan.
