Elbeyi Karimli, a member of the opposition Azerbaijan Popular Front Party (AXCP), has been on a hunger strike since May 23.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He told his relatives that he is protesting his “unjust imprisonment based on fabricated charges.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Karimli was arrested in August 2023 after writing \u201cStalin\u201d on the statue of Heydar Aliyev.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m here today because I wrote ‘Stalin’ on the back of Heydar Aliyev\u2019s statue. At the police station, they told me, \u2018You have to choose: drugs or weapons\u2014otherwise, you\u2019ll be charged with treason. We\u2019ll load pictures of military facilities onto your phone and accuse you of passing military secrets to Armenia or Iran.\u2019 My mouth went dry when I heard this. They said, \u2018Don\u2019t make us find a kilo in your home like we did with Qiyas\u2026\u2019\u201d Karimli reportedly told his lawyer after his detention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2024, the Baku Court for Grave Crimes sentenced him to six years in prison under the article of the Criminal Code pertaining to possession of a large quantity of drugs with intent to sell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later, the Supreme Court removed the \u201cintent to sell\u201d charge from the verdict, reducing his sentence to five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In May 2016, two civic activists\u2014Qiyas Ibrahimov and Bayram Mammadov\u2014were arrested on drug charges after writing \u201cHappy Slave Holiday!\u201d on the statue of former president Heydar Aliyev. Both were sentenced to 10 years in prison. They were later released in 2019 by a presidential pardon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Elbeyi Karimli, a member of the opposition Azerbaijan Popular Front Party (AXCP), has been on a hunger strike since May 23. He told his relatives that he is protesting his “unjust imprisonment based on fabricated charges.” Karimli was arrested in August 2023 after writing \u201cStalin\u201d on the statue of Heydar Aliyev. \u201cI\u2019m here today because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":30749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1047],"class_list":["post-30748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-feed","tag-editor"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30750,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30748\/revisions\/30750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}