The human rights organisation Human Rights Watch has called for Azerbaijan to drop charges against Leyla Yunus, a human rights lawyer who has been accused of “insulting” the Ministry of Internal Affairs and causing “moral damage” to the reputation of the police.

Yunus has also been fined 100,000 Azerbaijani morats, the equivalent of £84,000. This was in response to an interview published by www.day.az in December 2008 where Yunus referred to the trial of several young men accused of kidnapping two sisters in 2005. One of the defendants confessed to the crime and said that the men had handed the girls over to the head officer in the local police department. At trial this defendant said the police had tortured him to compel him to withhold testimony about the alleged police involvement. In her interview Yunus called attention to the court’s delay in summoning the accused officer to give evidence, and the fact that the defendant’s accusations of torture in custody were ignored.

Yunus compared these actions to police conduct in Mexico and Nigeria, mentioning a prior kidnapping case in which several Ministry of Internal Affairs officials, including the deputy minister, were found guilty and sentenced to long prison terms. The Ministry of the Interior has called these accusations groundless and says that the comparison with foreign countries did not come from “official sources”.

Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch protests that comparison with other countries is the application of opinion, not libel. Furthermore, the usual definition of libel is against an individual not a class, which in this case is the Azerbaijani police force. Azerbaijan has signed up to both the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which guarantee freedom of expression.

The arrest comes in the wider context of a general restriction on human rights by the Azerbaijani authorities in the past two years. Actions have included the shutting down of newspapers, the arrest of political dissidents and human rights protectors and the closure of a human rights organisation.