The Russian High Commissioner for Human Rights, Tatiana Moskalkova, plans to petition to the Human Rights Commissioner of Azerbaijan, Elmira Suleymanova, requesting her to check the confinement conditions of blogger Alexander Lapshin, who is imprisoned in Azerbaijan, according to RIA Novosti news agency of Russia.

“Journalists are a special professional community that works in risk zones, and requires special attention and respect,” said Moskalkova. “I made a statement in the case of our journalist [i.e. Lapshin], who was extradited to Azerbaijan by Belarus.

“I regret that our colleagues from Azerbaijan did not listen. I will petition to Azerbaijan’s ombudsperson, so that she visit our citizen, and become convinced that he doesn’t need medical assistance and doesn’t complain about [his] confinement conditions.” 

After his visits to Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) in 2011 and 2012, Israeli Russian blogger and journalist Alexander Lapshin was “blacklisted” by Azerbaijan.

In June 2016, however, he paid a visit to Azerbaijan--but with a Ukrainian passport--and, subsequently, he published several articles criticizing the Azerbaijani authorities.

Afterward, Azerbaijan issued an international search for this famous blogger. On December 15, 2016, Lapshin was detained in the Belarusian capital city of Minsk, and based on this search.

On January 26 of the current year, the Minsk city court dismissed the blogger's appeal of the Belarusian General Prosecutor's Office decision to extradite him to Azerbaijan.

On February 7, the Supreme Court of Belarus dismissed the appeals that were filed into this case, and upheld the aforesaid decision by the General Prosecutor’s Office.

And on the evening of the same day, Belarus extradited Alexander Lapshin to the Azerbaijani capital city of Baku, where he was taken into custody.