ASSA-Irada,
7, April 2008

The jailed editor of two Azerbaijani newspapers stopped the hunger strike he launched late in March after meeting with the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Miklos Haraszti at the detention facility on Monday, his lawyer said.

A group of journalists and some opposition politicians who had joined the over 10-day protest have followed suit.

"After Eynulla Fatullayev stopped the hunger strike, we did the same," said one of the protest organizers, Gundalik Azerbaijan executive Shahvalad Chobanoghlu. "We partly achieved our goal, in a sense that we succeeded in drawing enough attention of the local and international community to the protest."

The protest aimed to support Fatullayev, editor of the Russian-language weekly Realny Azerbaijan and the Azeri-language daily Gundalik Azerbaijan newspapers who was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail on charges of posing a terrorist threat, inciting inter-ethnic rifts and tax evasion last year. The hunger strikers protested the imprisonment of three of their counterparts, calling on international organizations such as the OSCE and Council of Europe to help to put a stop to what they describe as violations of free expression in Azerbaijan.*