Azeri Report
BAKU. May 21, 2014: Today, the state prosecutor finished presenting his case against Anar Mammadli, chairman of Elections Monitoring and Democratic Studies Center (EMDSC), a local election watchdog organization, at the Baku Court for Grave Crimes. The state prosecutor demanded a prison sentence of nine years for Anar Mammadli and eight years and half for his colleagues at EMDS Bashir Suleymanli and Elnur Mammadov. Anar Mammadli, Bashir Suleymanli and Elnur Mammadov are charged with crimes not typical for nonprofit organization activists – tax evasion, illegal business, abuse of office, embezzlement on a large scale and election fraud. In essence, the Azerbaijani government is accusing Anar Mammadli and his colleagues of receiving grants from international donors without an approval from the government (illegal business charge), since the government classifies their activity not as nonprofit but as a business, they are also accused of not paying taxes on those grants, and finally, because the EMDSC monitored elections in Azerbaijan, the prosecution also threw in a charge about election fraud. The prosecution has not presented any substantive evidence to prove the charges, and in fact none of the international donors press any charges against the EMDSC and its employees for any “embezzlement” and “abuse of office”. These charges are brought on behalf of the Azerbaijani government as if Anar Mammadli, Bashir Suleymanli and Elnur Mammadov held any government offices or received any funds from the Azerbaijani government which they then mishandled. U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was EMDSC’s main donor. Council of Europe, OSCE as well as many international huamn rights organizations, including the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, regarded these charges against Anar Mammadli politically motivated and called on the Azerbaijani government to drop these charges (Azeri Report).