Drug charges are perhaps the most common criminal charges in Azerbaijan. They are frequently filed against opposition figures and there is a widespread impression that police regularly plant narcotics on detainees.
Sometimes these charges can be almost comical. Recently, a man detained while wearing shorts was given long pants by police before he entered the police station – for the sake of propriety, they said – and later drugs were “found” in these pants. In a rather surprising development for Azerbaijan, even the judge reviewing the case didn’t buy the cops’ story and set the man free.
There’s been much talk of “drugs” in the context of the recent mass arrests of devout Shia Muslims accused of spying and spreading religious propaganda on Iran’s behalf – a crackdown which intensified after the armed attack on a lawmaker in late March. But the accusations aren’t straightforward. Many recent detainees have been identified and branded spies and traitors by pro-government media when the only charges pressed against them relate to drugs.
In another case, one religious detainee, who was originally charged with participating in the attack against the MP, had his charges softened only after foreign-based Meydan TV aired security camera footage showing the man in his shop at the time of the attack. And guess what his new charges are: drugs.
Yet another detainee, originally arrested in relation to an armed attack at a Baku supermarket, is also facing drug charges. Drugs were “found” on his person after he voluntarily went to the police station after being summoned for interrogation. A natural question occurred to his father: “Who goes to a police station with drugs in their pocket?”
-an Azerbaijani journalist