Azerbaijan Bars Entry to a Georgian Human Rights Worker

Azerbaijan on Monday barred a veteran human rights worker from entering the country, the latest in a series of events that international rights advocates have condemned and cited as evidence of increasing political repression.

The rights worker, Giorgi Gogia, who is a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, was blocked from entering Azerbaijan at the airport in Baku, the capital. He remained in the airport for 31 hours before being put on a plane to Tbilisi, Georgia, where he lives.

As a Georgian citizen, Mr. Gogia does not need a visa to enter Azerbaijan, and he has visited the country several times a year for more than a decade. He said officials at the airport had not given any explanation for refusing to let him enter.

Mr. Gogia had been planning to attend hearings in the court cases of two Azerbaijani human rights advocates, Rasul Jafarov and Intigam Aliyev, who were arrested in August and are being tried in separate cases on tax evasion, illegal entrepreneurship and other charges.

The arrests were part of an intense crackdown on dissent. Among others who have been arrested are Leyla Yunus, a veteran human rights advocate who was detained in July, and Khadija Ismayilova, a well-known investigative journalist who had angered high-level officials. In December, the authorities also raided the offices of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and detained several staff members. Ms. Yunus and Ms. Ismayilova remain in prison.

In a statement, Human Rights Watch said there had been at least 35 politically motivated arrests in Azerbaijan over the past year, and it noted that Mr. Jafarov had been seeking to raise awareness of these cases before the European Games, a major sporting event that will be held in Baku in June.

“Barring Giorgi Gogia from attending the trial hearings shows just how far Azerbaijan’s authorities have taken their crackdown on human rights,” Hugh Williamson, the director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch in Berlin, said in a statement. “They’ve ruthlessly silenced many critical voices inside the country, and now they don’t want to let anyone in to bear witness to what they are doing.”

Mr. Gogia, reached in Georgia, said that he had never had a problem entering Azerbaijan before and that he had never visited the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh by traveling through Armenia.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have been in a simmering war over Nagorno-Karabakh for more than 20 years, and people who have traveled to that region are often barred from visiting Azerbaijan.

“It was clear that they have made political decisions in the end not to let me in,” Mr. Gogia said.