The price of freedom: Torture of political prisoners in Europe today

“Leyla was arrested last night”, said my friend when the waiter walked away from our table in a hillside restaurant in Baku. It was the end of April 2014. In Baku’s political circles, there was only one Leyla, the firebrand dissident, regime critic and human rights activist Leyla Yunus. “So, I might have some phone interviews while we have lunch”, he explained soberly. My long-time colleague and friend, Jamil Hasanli was head of the National Council of Democratic Forces, a united opposition formed in 2013 to field a single candidate for the presidential election against ten-year incumbent Ilham Aliyev. Jamil had been that candidate and thus the most recent member of the opposition to lose a tainted election to President Aliyev. The defeat was a foregone conclusion and did not affect his celebrity or his leading position in the coalition of democratic parties, so opposition news outlets wanted to quote him. There had been a recent surge of arrests of human rights defenders, journalists, and regime critics. The regime’s targets had been second-tier leadership of their organizations, or young activists, journalists and bloggers that the regime feared after colour revolutions toppled authoritarian rulers fromCairo to Kyiv. The arrest of Leyla Yunus was a departure from that pattern, and it sent shock waves through society. On the evening of April 28, she and her husband historian Arif Yunus were removed from an outbound flight on their way to a conference in Belgium. Leyla was taken into custody, and Arif, who was subject to hypertension, was taken to the hospital. Their apartment was searched. These actions signalled an escalation of regime pressure on its critics because of the couple’s prominence in Azerbaijan and internationally as activists and scholars and, in Leyla’s case, as Knight of the Legion of Honor of France. If Leyla could be arrested, who was safe? News of her arrest was difficult to find on state-run television, so I looked for newspapers in the kiosks. In 2014, there were still many opposition newspapers although prices had been raised and their offices, like those of the major opposition parties, had been pushed out of the city centre to remote locations on the outskirts. I walked from my hotel downtown to a large newspaper kiosk with an extensive collection of newspapers and magazines. Speaking Azerbaijani, I asked the young man in the kiosk for one government newspaper, Azerbaijan, and about six from opposition sources. I saw that