US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom issued annual Report on International Religious Freedom for 2022. Azerbaijan has many shortcomings, according to the report.
In March, amendments to the religious freedom law came into effect that transferred responsibility for appointing and reappointing religious personnel in all mosques from the state-controlled Caucasian Muslim Board (CMB) to the State Committee on Religious Associations of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SCWRA). The government also has authority to approve the appointment of religious figures in non-Islamic religious communities.
Local human rights groups and others said the government continued to physically abuse, temporarily hold incommunicado, arrest, and imprison religious activists, and that many arrests and convictions of religious figures, including on drug possession charges, were politically motivated. During the year, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found the government violated individual freedom of religion or belief in two judgments involving seven individuals. A human rights nongovernmental organization (NGO) said that as of year’s end, 22 individuals remained imprisoned for their religious beliefs or practices.
“Authorities continued to initiate legal action against individuals associated with the unregistered Muslim Unity Movement (MUM), which the government characterized as an extremist group and accused of receiving funding from Iran. MUM members continued to report authorities physically abused them while in custody. One MUM member reported authorities raped him, then held him in administrative detention (detention for a nonviolent offense) for 15 days. Some civil society activists and human rights advocates considered the incarceration of MUM members politically motivated”, the report said.
The Norwegian-based international religious freedom NGO Forum 18 reported the SCWRA fired Imam Mirseymur Aliyev for holding end-of-Ramadan (Eid al-Fitr) prayers on May 3 instead of the government-approved date of May 2. The SCWRA said Aliyev voluntarily resigned. NGOs said the government fined Muslims who met in private homes for group prayer without permission.
“The U.S. Ambassador, Chargé d’Affaires (Chargé), and other U.S. embassy officers engaged government officials to advocate the release of individuals that civil society groups said were imprisoned for their religious beliefs. The Ambassador, the Chargé, and embassy officers urged government officials to address longstanding problems involving the registration process for smaller religious communities and to implement a civilian alternative to military service for conscientious objectors, as stipulated in the constitution. The Ambassador advocated at the highest levels of government for the protection of religious and cultural sites in the territories returned to Azerbaijani control after the 2020 fighting”, the report added.
The report also touches upon the Armenian cultural heritage in Azerbaijani-occupied territories of Nagorno-Karabakh and destruction of many place.
“In September, Cornell University’s Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) released a study based on satellite imagery taken during the year that indicated that 108 (98 percent) of medieval and early modern Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries located in the country’s autonomous Nakhchivan region and still extant at the end of the Soviet period had been destroyed between 1997 and 2011. Several of these cultural sites, such as the St. Tovma Monastery, were replaced with mosques or other civic buildings. CHW said, “These findings provide, for the first time, conclusive forensic evidence that silent and systematic cultural erasure has been a feature of Azerbaijan’s domestic ethnic policies.”
In October, CHW released a follow up report that said sometime between March and July, the 18th-19th century Armenian Church of St. Sargis in the village of Susanlyg/Mokhrenes was destroyed. According to CHW, the destruction of St. Sargis “represents the first major violation of a ruling issued by the International Court of Justice in December 2021 calling on Azerbaijan to prevent such abuses.” CHW said destruction of the church was not linked to road construction but appeared to be “an indiscriminate act” and that “should we see an increase in such activities, it could threaten a wide range of heritage sites in the region, including not only Armenian churches and cemeteries but also Islamic and Azerbaijani places of memory, worship, and history.”
On February 3, press outlets reported Minister of Culture Anar Karimov stated he had established a working group to remove “fictitious traces written by Armenians on (Caucasian) Albanian religious temples.” A February 7 statement from the ministry stated the Minister was misquoted and that any “falsifications” to monuments found by the working group would not be removed but only presented to the international community. The Ambassador consistently underscored to the Presidential Administration and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the importance of granting UNESCO representatives and international journalists unimpeded access to religious and cultural sites”, the report said.
