Azerbaijani bloggers lose appeal against jail sentence for 'donkey' press conference

Two activist bloggers have failed in their appeal to overturn a jail sentence in Azerbaijan for a joke video posted on YouTube.

Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli were sentenced to four and half years between them following their online video of a spoof press conference delivered by a donkey, in 2008.

The appeal court upheld the original court decision on Wednesday.

"The video was posted in the wake of a news story about how the Azerbaijani government had allegedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars importing donkeys from Germany, in a deal that may have masked corruption or theft of public funds," Amnesty International reported yesterday.

"The video questions the purchase of the donkeys, the introduction of restrictive legislation for NGOs and the low priority the government attributes to human rights."

The pair have "fallen victim to the increasingly repressive measures taken by the Azerbaijani authorities to crackdown on critics of the government," says Andrea Huber, Europe and Central Asia deputy programme director at Amnesty International, in a release.

"They were convicted on fabricated charges, in a trial falling short of international standards for fairness, solely because they were expressing their views."

Amnesty has accused the Azerbaijani government of "stifling dissent" and said that the charges were "fabricated charges of 'hooliganism'".

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