PACE touched upon numerous arrests of journalists in Azerbaijan in its report on freedom of media published on the PACE website. NEWS.am posts the passages of the report on Azerbaijan.

The Azerbaijan authorities have been accused of arbitrarily imprisoning journalists and mistreating them in jail. On 17 August 2009 Novruzali Mamedov, the editor of a defunct minority newspaper Talyshi Sado, died in a Baku prison, where he had been serving a ten-year sentence since February 2007. The CPJ had protested that Mamedov was jailed on fabricated charges including treason. The Paris-based International Federation for Human rights alleged that he was tortured in jail. Several international groups claimed that he had been also been denied necessary medical treatment while suffering from ill health in prison. A prison spokesman said the cause of his death was a stroke. Talyshi Sado stopped publishing soon after Mamedov was jailed.

Police brutality is alleged in the case of Emin Huseynov, the head of Institute for Reporters' Freedom and Safety in Azerbaijan, who suffered head injuries when he was reportedly struck on the head by police with the butt of a gun in a Baku police station on 14 June 2008. Huseynov was covering an event at a Baku cafe when it was raided by police. Officials later attributed his injuries to self-harm.

The 2005 murder of Elmar Huseynov, editor in chief of the journal Monitor and leading advocate of democratisation, remains unsolved. Huseynov was killed outside his home in the run-up to elections in 2005.International media monitoring groups have alleged that government officials were involved in Huseynov’s death.

Eynulla Fatullayev, the editor of Gundelike Azerbaijan and the Russian-language newspaper Realny Azerbaijan, has been in prison since his conviction in April 2007 over allegations he made in newspaper articles that Elmar Huseynov’s murder was ordered by high-ranking officials. International Pen and the CPJ denounced as “politicised” Fatullayev’s convictions for terrorism and inciting ethnic hatred. In total he received an eight-year jail sentence. Earlier he had been given suspended sentence after being found guilty of defaming the Interior Minister. CPJ states that he had received death threats. His newspaper’s offices were also shut down.

OSCE FoM reported that in May 2007 another Realny Azerbaijani reporter, Uzeyir Jafarov, had been beaten almost to death by people who had attended Fatullayev’s trial.

Three journalists serving jail sentences on defamation and other charges were released on 21 April 2009. The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) on 24 September 2009 called for the release of a further five editors, journalists and bloggers from prison. WAN claimed that all five were being punished for being critics of the government, and it deplored the “pervasive climate of intimidation and fear” in the media environment of Azerbaijan."