Foreign Policy Blogs

Amnesty International Petition on Behalf of Jabbar Savalan

Amnesty International has put up a petition addressed to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, appealing for the release of Jabbar Savalan, the young pro-democracy activist who was charged with drug possession and convicted in May. As noted on this blog earlier, Savalan was arrested “after calling for protest actions on Facebook and attending a youth conference in the city of Sumgayit. He was taken to a police station where police searched him and allegedly found a small amount of marijuana in his jacket pocket.”

Amnesty International Petition on Behalf of Jabbar Savalan

Jabbar Savalan

The arrest and conviction have been widely interpreted as punishment for his political activities. The Amnesty International petition can be found here.

 

Author

Karl Rahder

Karl Rahder has written on the South Caucasus for ISN Security Watch and ISN Insights (http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/ISN-Insights), news and global affairs sites run by the Swiss government. Karl splits his time between the US and the former USSR - mostly the Caucasus and Ukraine, sometimes teaching international relations at universities (in Chicago, Baku, Tbilisi) or working on stories for ISN and other publications. Karl received his MA from the University of Chicago, and first came to the Caucasus in 2004 while on a CEP Visiting Faculty Fellowship. He's reported from the Caucasus on topics such as attempted coups, sedition trials, freedom of the press, and the frozen Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. For many years, Karl has also served as an on-call election observer for the OSCE, and in 2010, he worked as a long-term observer in Afghanistan for Democracy International.