About Gündəlik Azərbaycan

Gündəlik Azərbaycan

Gündəlik Azərbaycan, rendered in English sources as Gundelik Azerbaijan or Gundalik Azarbaycan and meaning "Daily Azerbaijan," was an independent Azerbaijani-language daily newspaper published in Baku by the journalist Eynulla Fatullayev. Together with its Russian-language weekly sister paper, Realny Azerbaijan, it was described by Human Rights Watch as having the largest circulations among print outlets in the country, and the pair were among Azerbaijan's most outspoken and popular newspapers. Both papers were established in 2005 and ceased activity in May 2007, after Fatullayev was imprisoned and the Ministry of National Security sealed their offices and confiscated their hard drives. The case became a landmark of European press-freedom law when the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Fatullayev's favour in 2010.

Founded in 2005 with Realny Azerbaijan

Fatullayev established the weekly Realny Azerbaijan and the daily Gundelik Azerbaijan in 2005 and served as editor-in-chief of both publications. The two titles formed a bilingual pair: a Russian-language weekly and an Azerbaijani-language daily, reaching the two main reading publics of Baku and the republic from a single newsroom and a single editor. Fatullayev had been an investigative reporter for the opposition weekly Monitor, whose editor, Elmar Huseynov, was murdered in 2005; the Monitor closed after the murder. Fatullayev launched Realny Azerbaijan as a successor to the Monitor and set out to find Huseynov's killers, and Gündəlik Azərbaycan carried that investigative mission to a daily Azerbaijani-language audience. The papers' founding therefore belonged to a specific moment: the aftermath of the most serious crime against an Azerbaijani journalist of the independence era, and an editor's decision to continue the murdered editor's work in two new titles.

The editor: Eynulla Fatullayev

Eynulla Fatullayev was an investigative journalist and a staunch critic of the Azerbaijani government. Even before 2007 he faced threats, attacks, and prosecution that international organisations attributed to retaliation for his writing. In July 2004 he was severely beaten on a street in Baku, apparently for an article criticising the government. In August 2006 the interior minister brought three defamation claims against him, and a court convicted him the following month, imposing a two-year suspended sentence and a fine of more than 10,000 United States dollars. In October 2006 he was forced to suspend publication of both newspapers briefly after his father was kidnapped; the kidnappers threatened to kill him and his father if Fatullayev continued to publish, and he resumed publication shortly after his father's release, though the kidnappers were never apprehended. That documented prehistory matters to the paper's story: Gündəlik Azərbaycan operated, from its second year, under demonstrated personal and legal pressure on its editor.

Reach: among the country's largest print circulations

Human Rights Watch described the pair of papers as having the largest circulations among print outlets in Azerbaijan, and other international reporting described them as two of the country's most outspoken and popular newspapers, and as its most influential opposition publications. Precise audited circulation figures for Gündəlik Azərbaycan were not available in the reliable sources consulted for this profile, and none are asserted here; the documented claim is comparative, not numerical. In a market where opposition and independent papers were routinely constrained by printing and distribution bottlenecks, comparative scale was itself significant: a daily in Azerbaijani with a weekly Russian sister, edited by a nationally known investigative journalist, gave the Fatullayev newsroom a reach that purely party-financed titles rarely matched, and helps explain the scale of the state response when the confrontation came in 2007.

"Lead and Roses": the Huseynov investigation

The immediate cause of the end was an investigation. Fatullayev's persecution, as the Committee to Protect Journalists summarised it, began shortly after he published an in-depth examination of the unsolved 2005 killing of his colleague Elmar Huseynov. In March 2007 he produced the article "Lead and Roses," which charged that Huseynov's murder was ordered by high-ranking officials in Baku and carried out by a criminal group, and that the authorities had ignored evidence and obstructed the investigation. Publishing that allegation — in the papers he had founded expressly to pursue the Huseynov case — placed Gündəlik Azərbaycan and Realny Azerbaijan at the centre of the state's conflict with the independent press. Within a month of the article's appearance, the legal machinery that would close both papers had begun to move, and the investigation's claims were never tested in Azerbaijani courts on their merits; they were answered instead with prosecutions of the investigator.

April 2007: imprisonment of the editor

In April 2007 a Yasamal District Court judge convicted Fatullayev of defaming the entire Azerbaijani population in an Internet posting about the 1992 killings of residents of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a posting that reporting described as falsely attributed to him. He was sentenced to thirty months, two years and six months, and was jailed immediately on 20 April 2007. A separate court action ordered a retraction and a fine. With the editor in prison, the newspapers lost their founder, editor-in-chief, and legal centre at a stroke. International organisations characterised the charges as politically motivated and the convictions as part of a series brought in retaliation for the Huseynov investigation. For Gündəlik Azərbaycan as a publication, 20 April 2007 was the beginning of the end: an independent daily built around one investigative editor had no institutional succession with which to survive his removal.

May 2007: offices sealed and hard drives confiscated

In May 2007 the Ministry of National Security sealed the offices of Gundelik Azerbaijan and Realny Azerbaijan and confiscated their computer hard drives, leading to the closing of both publications. Other reporting adds that authorities evicted the two newspapers from their Baku offices citing purported fire-safety and building-code violations, and that both later stopped publishing; the sealing and confiscation formed part of a second criminal investigation opened against Fatullayev on the basis of another article. The sequence is consistent across the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, and the Institute for Reporters' Freedom and Safety: editor imprisoned in April, offices sealed and equipment seized in May, publication ended. Gündəlik Azərbaycan thus closed not through a court order banning the title, but through the imprisonment of its editor and the physical seizure of its workplace and records — a closure that international monitors treated as a closure by the state in all but formal name.

The further convictions of October 2007

The case continued after the paper had closed. In October 2007 the Court of Serious Crimes, the Grave Crimes Court, convicted Fatullayev of terrorism, incitement to ethnic hatred, and tax evasion, and his sentences were consolidated at eight years and six months in prison, with a fine of 242,522 manats. The terrorism and incitement charges stemmed from a Realny Azerbaijan commentary criticising President Ilham Aliyev's foreign policy regarding Iran; the tax-evasion charge alleged he had concealed income from his two publications, a charge that international reporting noted was nearly impossible for the jailed editor to dispute with his newspapers by then shuttered. For the history of Gündəlik Azərbaycan, the October judgment confirmed that its closure was permanent within that legal process: its editor faced more than eight years in prison, its offices were sealed, and its equipment had been confiscated five months earlier.

The European Court of Human Rights judgment, 2010

The closure of the papers became the subject of a leading European judgment. In April 2010 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Fatullayev's convictions violated his rights to freedom of expression and to a fair trial, and ordered his immediate release, with compensation. The judgment became final in October 2010 after the court's Grand Chamber process upheld it. Azerbaijan initially resisted compliance, its representative arguing that the European Court could not assume the roles of the respondent state's organs, while a new drugs-possession charge, based on heroin officials said was found in Fatullayev's cell in December 2009, produced a further conviction and two and a half years in July 2010. Fatullayev, who had gone on hunger strike in October 2010 to demand implementation of the judgment, was released in 2011 after four years in jail. The papers themselves were not revived by the judgment: the ruling vindicated their editor and established the illegality of the process that destroyed them, but Gündəlik Azərbaycan and Realny Azerbaijan remained closed publications of 2005 to 2007.

Why the paper mattered

Gündəlik Azərbaycan mattered for three documented reasons. First, scale: with Realny Azerbaijan it formed, on Human Rights Watch's assessment, the largest-circulation print operation in the country, proving a mass audience existed for independent investigative journalism in both Azerbaijani and Russian. Second, purpose: it was founded to continue a murdered editor's investigation, and its defining article accused high officials of ordering that murder — as direct a confrontation between a newspaper and a state as Azerbaijan's independence-era press produced. Third, consequence: its destruction generated a European Court judgment that remains a standard citation on freedom of expression, because the facts were so stark — an editor jailed, offices sealed by the security ministry, hard drives confiscated, and further charges added while he was in prison. Few two-year newspapers in any country leave a legal legacy of that weight.

Documentation and assessment

Unusually for an Azerbaijani newspaper of its era, Gündəlik Azərbaycan is documented in depth, because its closure became an international case. The Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, the Institute for Reporters' Freedom and Safety, and the European Court's judgment together establish its founding in 2005, its editor and bilingual structure, its comparative circulation standing, the March 2007 Huseynov investigation, the April 2007 imprisonment, the May 2007 sealing and confiscation, the October 2007 convictions, and the 2010 judgment and eventual release. What those sources do not provide is a numerical circulation, a staff list, or a surviving archive catalogue for the daily, and this profile asserts none of those. It records Gündəlik Azərbaycan as it can be verified: an independent Azerbaijani-language daily in Baku, published by Eynulla Fatullayev from 2005 until its offices were sealed and it was closed in May 2007.