Friends of Jordan Joe and Baku Kon: Azerbaijan bans British newspaper from games coverage

The Baku dictatorship has banned the British newspaper, the Guardian, and many other media houses and human rights activists and organisations, from entering Azerbaijan to cover the European Games, which begin on Friday and which will feature 6,000+ athletes from 50 countries, in a spectacle that has cost Azerbaijan billions so far.

The European Games have put the spotlight on Azerbaijan, as dictator Ilham Aliyev hoped, but not for the reasons he wanted. The run-up to the games has brought renewed interest in the fact that he locks up journalists and human rights activists and has made the subject newsworthy and topical to European newspapers and news stations again.

This is more so because Aliyev, instead of tempering his vicious attitude towards those who thwart him, has upscaled his human rights violations in the lead-up to the games, thinking that the best way to prepare for international attention is to silence his critics by violence of imprisonment.

Typically of those who are unused to democratic norms, he thinks that criticism of his government by journalists and human rights activists will cause him more embarrassment than Europe-wide press coverage of how he has imprisoned or silenced them.

The international organisation Human Rights Watch says that the past two years have brought “the worst crackdown the country has seen in the post-Soviet era”. Last year alone, the Baku government prosecuted or jailed at least 35 journalists, human rights activists and critics on unfounded charges.

When media coverage of these abuses escalated outside Azerbaijan, the Baku dictatorship reacted by declaring to be ‘persona non grata’ those foreign journalists and human rights activists who had criticised its actions. Then it took the matter further and banned all journalists from those media houses which had covered its human rights violations.

They include the Guardian’s sports editor, who has been denied permission to cover the games for his newspaper.

The European Olympic Committee has said that the ban on journalists is “completely against the spirit of sport” and that it will bring up the matter with the Azerbaijan government “to ensure full and free reporting on Baku 2015 for all media wishing to cover the European Games.”

Also this week, British human rights activist Emma Hughes was detained at Baku airport and deported. She had been accredited to cover the Games as a journalist. Azerbaijan has also ordered Amnesty International to postpone a trip to Baku to release a report on human rights there until after the games.

In March, Human Rights Watch’s senior researcher on the region was also detained at Baku airport and deported.

Britain’s shadow sports minister, Clive Efford, told the Guardian that the ban on journalists raised questions for sponsor British Petroleum. “Freedom of speech is absolutely essential and it’s outrageous that any country would seek to restrict free reporting around a sporting event,” he said. “Perhaps BP ought to be considering their position, if they are sponsoring an event that is resulting in journalists being prevented from reporting freely.”