Social Support Needed by AI Debate ‘Donkey Bloggers’

Claire Thompson, freelance PR Consultant, Waves PR

This was the blog I didn’t expect to be writing after the #aitech event. Things were fairly cerebral, looking at wider issues. It’s now time to get down and dirty.

You see, we were shown a video of a couple of guys taking the rise out of politicians in Azerbaijan. It had been posted on YouTube by blogger Adnan Hajizade following  a news story about how the Azerbaijani government had allegedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars importing donkeys from Germany.  (The deal is suspected by many Azerbaijanis to have masked some kind of corruption/misappropriation of funds.)

The video (humorously) questions the purchase of the donkeys, the introduction of restrictive legislation for NGOs and the low priority the government attributes to human rights.

Only now it’s not so funny. On Wednesday, a Baku court upheld the convictions of Adnan and fellow blogger Emin Milli sentencing them to over two years prison each.

Emin Milli is the co-founder of an online community that discusses politics called Alumni Network, while Adnan Hajizade is a co-ordinator of the youth movement known as OL!, which advocates non-violence and tolerance. The bloggers were arrested on 8 July 2009 after they were attacked by two unknown men and were accused of “hooliganism”.

There were seven appeal hearings but the two key witnesses were not called to give evidence. The appeal court upheld the original court decision to reject evidence without explanation. (This included photographs of injuries to the bloggers’ and video footage of the incident.)

Amnesty International believes their trial was unfair and that the two are prisoners of conscience. We can stand shoulder to shoulder with them by watching the video, blogging about them and taking a few seconds to print and send a letter: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=671

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1. Social Support Needed by AI Debate 'Donkey Bloggers' | Waves PR … | azerbaijantoday — March 11, 2010 @ 1:00 pm

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