The Prosecutor General’s Office of Azerbaijan initiated a criminal case “for torturing an Azerbaijani serviceman.” According to the spread message, “videos were spread on the pages of several media and social networks, where it can be seen how a soldier of the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan, Akhundov Husein Ahliman Oglu, born in 2003, captured in Armenia, is being subjected to inhumane treatment and torture.”
Azerbaijani Human Rights Defender Sabina Aliyeva addressed the international organizations with a special statement, demanding to respond to the “fact of inhumane treatment” of the Azerbaijani serviceman found in Armenia. She referred to the photos and videos published in the Armenian media and claimed that “the serviceman of the Azerbaijani armed forces was subjected to torture and inhumane treatment.”
Reflecting on this statement during Aravot’s “Aresum” (“Confrontation”) program, Ara Gharagyozyan, the lawyer of the “Helsinki Association” Human Rights NGO, said: “It would be good for the human rights defender of Azerbaijan to talk about the tortures happening in her country. You know what cruel actions and tortures Azerbaijan resorted to during the war, even against women. And the world saw the inhumane treatment of prisoners held in Azerbaijan.”
It is evident from the distributed videos that the violence was not resorted to by the representatives of the State but by those citizens who discovered the soldier suspected of killing their compatriot. And there is a point of view that when it is not the representatives of the state who caught the enemy who violated the border, it is meaningless to talk about non-observance of the established procedures.
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Zaruhi Hovhannisyan, Head of the Group of Public Monitors Implementing Supervision over the Criminal-Executive Institutions and Bodies of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Armenia and Public Relations Officer of the “Women’s Support Center ” said in this regard: “In fact, violence is always condemnable, but first of all, we should consider who is committing it and under what circumstances. The state is always responsible for torture; the article is like that: torture is under the state’s responsibility. If the state authorities did not do it, the army did not, or the police arrested the person after the discovery, we cannot discuss torture.
However, we can talk about a group of people who, for some reason, performed the function of the state in the first place. Because for so many days, there were alerts that there was infiltration in the country, and the relevant bodies, which were called to protect the security, could not detect it. And they found a group of people who are arbitrary in their behavior, especially after seeing the horrific atrocities that have occurred in the last two years. And the public, unfortunately, has not received the assessment of the International Courts or Azerbaijan itself regarding what happened to our servicemen in state bodies.”
The entire conversation is in the video
Anna ISRAYELYAN
