The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), responding to the complaint of the Azerbaijani side, on Monday upheld the decision of the ECtHR of May 20, in which the Azerbaijani authorities were found guilty of illegal arrest, torture and attempted murder in a Baku prison of famous blogger and journalist Alexander Lapshin. The court ordered Baku to pay the Israeli Lapshin a monetary compensation in the amount of 30 thousand euros.
“Of course, I am glad that the court in Strasbourg made such a decision,” Lapshin told DW. At the same time, he finds it strange that Baku went to court to review the case: “After all, the ECtHR, as a rule, in almost 99 percent of cases, does not abandon its earlier decisions,” he said.
“My ‘crime’ was that in 2011, as a tourist, I visited the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic [(Artsakh)],” said Lapshin. According to him, before that he had visited more than 150 countries on all continents, and it did not even occur to him that he could be put on the international wanted list five years after that trip.
According to the blogger, obviously, the Azerbaijani authorities did not like the publications on social media, which were seen by hundreds of thousands of Lapshin’s followers. He was accused not only of crossing the border without agreement with the Azerbaijani authorities, but also of “supporting separatism” and “calls for the overthrow of the current government in Azerbaijan.”
In 2016, Lapshin was arrested in the Belarusian capital Minsk at the request of Azerbaijan. Two months later, which he spent in one of the local prisons, he was handed over to Baku on the personal instructions of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. A year later, a Baku court, considering the blogger’s accusations of calls for the overthrow of the government and support for separatism unproven, found him guilty of “illegally visiting” Karabakh. The prosecution required him six and a half years in prison, but the court sentenced him to three years.
Despite the fact that Israel, Russia, the United States, and the European Union stood up for the blogger, he spent seven months in prison. He was tortured, forbidden to use the telephone, write and read, and the only book he was given was the Koran, although Lapshin was Jewish by religion.
“It was seven months later that I was attacked,” Alexander Lapshin told DW. “The guards tried to kill me, although later the authorities tried to present the incident as a suicide attempt.” Lapshin spent four days in a coma, after which Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev pardoned him and sent him on a charter flight to Tel Aviv. The examination at home confirmed the fact of the attempted murder of the blogger.
In 2018, Lapshin complained to the ECtHR, accusing Azerbaijan of illegal imprisonment, ill-treatment in prison and attempted murder. It took about three years until the ECtHR found the Azerbaijani authorities guilty and ordered them to pay monetary compensation to the blogger.
