A demonstration was held in front of the Government Chancellery of Georgia in support of Afgan Sadigov, an Azerbaijani journalist who has been detained in Georgia while awaiting a court decision regarding extradition to Azerbaijan.
On Tuesday, around two dozen local journalists and activists, together with Afgan Sadigov’s wife and two children, gathered to show solidarity and demand Sadigov’s release.
Sadigov, the head of the Azerbaijani news outlet and YouTube channel Azel.TV, was originally detained in Tbilisi on 3 August. He had been living in Georgia with his family since December 2023.
Dimitri Nozadze, a lawyer from Rights Georgia, told OC Media on the day of his arrest that Baku had requested Sadigov’s extradition in July, and that he was accused of fraud or extortion in Azerbaijan.
[Read more: Georgia detains and threatens to extradite Azerbaijani journalist]
Sadigov’s wife, Sevinj Sadigova, told journalists on Monday that she was demanding the immediate release of her husband.
She said the family had not received any answer from Georgia’s public defender regarding the reason Sadigov’s right to leave the country was suspended prior to his arrest, leaving him only able to travel to Azerbaijan.
Sevinj Sadigova stated that her husband was declared internationally wanted by the government of Azerbaijan on 10 May, and in her opinion, his arrest in Georgia was ordered by the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev.
She claimed that if her husband was handed over to Azerbaijan, their whole family would be in danger.
Tamta Mikeladze, the head of the local human rights group, the Social Justice Centre, told OC Media that Sadigov was under ‘extradition custody, although the substantive extradition case has not been started and the prosecutor’s office has not yet entered the court with such an appeal’.
‘However, since they risked extradition custody, we expect that this process may be risky for Afgan Sadighov and his family’, she said.
Mikeladze said they had appealed to international organisations and embassies to take an interest in the case.
‘We are very worried about the safety of this family, who say that they are under constant surveillance in Tbilisi and at the same time receive threatening letters online’, Mikeladze said.
Gela Mtivlishvili, editor of the online news site Mtis Ambebi, told OC Media that there was an expectation that Sadigov would be handed over to Azerbaijan.
He said Azerbaijani journalists previously considered Georgia ‘one of the closest safe-havens’.
‘After the high-profile case of Afgan Mukhtarli, we are convinced that Georgia is no longer a safe space for our Azerbaijani colleagues’, he added.
Mukhtarli was abducted from near his home in Tbilisi in 2017 before reappearing in Azerbaijani custody the following day. He has accused the Georgian authorities of being behind the abduction.
Mtivlishvili stated that Sadigov was most likely to be threatened with the same thing as Mukhtarli, and that ‘we, his colleagues, are obliged to protect him from possible violations’.
‘I don’t believe that the government of Georgia will not hand him over, and therefore we must use international legal mechanisms to somehow protect him’, Mtivlishvili said.
In 2016, Sadigov was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on charges of aggravated assault, with the sentence later reduced by one year.
He was later arrested in 2019 and sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of extortion. The sentence was reduced to four years after a presidential pardon in May 2022.
In late July 2024, Sadigov told OC Media that he had decided to move to Georgia the previous year because he and his family did not feel safe in Azerbaijan.
A renewed crackdown on journalism in Azerbaijan began in November 2023, with at least 10 journalists currently in prison in what is recognised by international rights and media organisations as political persecution.
[Read more: Editorial | Ilham Aliyev’s attempt to eradicate the free press cannot succeed]
