The Institute for Reporters\u2019 Freedom and Safety (IRFS) has urged the UN Human Rights Council to prosecute foreign hit squads locally, warning of a “deeply concerning” global surge in state-sponsored assassinations of exiled dissidents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The IRFS made the appeal during a session of the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking in Geneva, the IRFS warned that an increasing number of governments were relying on extraterritorial violence to silence journalists, bloggers, and activists who had fled abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Failing to try these perpetrators locally creates a dangerous climate of impunity that directly invites further attacks,” the IRFS said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The warning follows a landmark ruling on 10 June by a French court in Rennes, which sentenced eight men to up to 30 years in prison for the attempted murder of exiled Azerbaijani blogger Mahammad Mirzali. The court established that the 2021 knife attack was a coordinated attempt orchestrated to silence the prominent critic of the Azerbaijani government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thursday also marked the second anniversary of the shooting of Kazakh opposition journalist Aidos Sadykov, who was targeted in Kyiv, Ukraine, on 18 June 2024. Sadykov died in hospital two weeks later, and his suspected killers remain unpunished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The IRFS also highlighted the case of Emin Huseynov, an Azerbaijani human rights defender and co-founder of the IRFS, who reported being followed by suspected armed agents in Geneva in February. Huseynov filmed the men as they fled, following what he believed was a coordinated attempt to abduct or assassinate him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The IRFS called on sovereign states to strengthen coordination to prevent and investigate extraterritorial operations and ensure the right to life within their territories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We call on member states to firmly exercise domestic jurisdiction and locally prosecute individuals detained for planning extrajudicial executions,” the IRFS added, warning that extraditing suspects to their home states allowed them to bypass accountability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Institute for Reporters\u2019 Freedom and Safety (IRFS) has urged the UN Human Rights Council to prosecute foreign hit squads locally, warning of a “deeply concerning” global surge in state-sponsored assassinations of exiled dissidents. The IRFS made the appeal during a session of the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday. Speaking in Geneva, the IRFS […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":31623,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1047],"class_list":["post-31621","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\/31621","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=31621"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31624,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31621\/revisions\/31624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irfs.org\/az\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}