About Hürriyyət

Hürriyyət

Hürriyyət, also transliterated Hurriyyat or Hurriyet and meaning "Freedom," is an opposition newspaper published in Baku and financed by the opposition Democratic Party of Azerbaijan. It has been in print since 1992, the year after Azerbaijan restored its independence from the Soviet Union, and it became one of the opposition dailies whose treatment by the authorities in the 2000s was documented in detail by international press-freedom and human-rights organisations. Its record in those reports — seized copies, a state printing house that refused to print it, a subway distribution ban, a suspension under financial pressure in 2004, and a state rent lawsuit in 2006 — makes it one of the best-documented case studies of the pressures on Azerbaijan's opposition print press, even though basic reference information about the paper, such as its founding editor and circulation history, remains thin in accessible sources.

An opposition party newspaper from 1992

Hürriyyət was in print from 1992 and was financed by the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, as EurasiaNet reported in December 2006 when the paper again came under state pressure. The party, led in exile by Rasul Guliyev, a former parliamentary speaker who had been granted political asylum in the United States, had a long history of disputes with the government. A party-financed newspaper in the Azerbaijani system of the 1990s and 2000s was a central political instrument: with television either state-owned or affiliated and broadcast licensing controlled by presidential appointees, opposition movements communicated with the public principally through print. Hürriyyət stood in that landscape alongside Azadliq, associated with the Popular Front, and Yeni Musavat, associated with the Musavat Party, as one of the small group of opposition dailies whose names recur together throughout the international reporting of the period.

Editors documented in the record

The international record names two editors of the paper in the early 2000s. Aydin Guliyev edited Hürriyyət in 2003, according to Reporters Without Borders. Vuqar Mammadov — also rendered Vugar Mamedov or Vuqar Mammedov in different reports — was its editor in 2004, according to Human Rights Watch, which interviewed him about the harassment of journalists after the October 2003 election, and Reporters Without Borders reporting from the same period quoted editor Vugar Mamedov on the state distribution company's conduct towards the paper. No fuller editor chronology, founding-editor record, or staff history for Hürriyyət is available in the reliable sources consulted for this profile, and none is reconstructed here. The names and dates above are the documented points, and they coincide with the period of the paper's most intense documented pressure.

The 2001 printing refusals

The paper's documented troubles predated the 2003 election. The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded that in November 2001 officials accused the opposition dailies Azadliq, Yeni Musavat, and Hurriyyet of "undermining Azerbaijan's statehood," and that subsequently a number of printing houses refused to print those publications. In December 2001 more than twenty journalists were injured when police violently dispersed a Baku rally protesting state harassment of the three newspapers. The episode established the pattern that later reports documented repeatedly for Hürriyyət: official denunciation followed by difficulty at the printing stage, where a newspaper dependent on a small number of presses — state-owned or private but vulnerable — could be silenced without a formal ban ever being issued against it.

May 2003: the subway distribution ban

In May 2003 Hürriyyət was among five newspapers hit by a distribution ban in the Baku subway. On 5 May 2003, Tagi Akhmadov, director general of Baku Metropolitan, issued an unofficial order suspending the sale of opposition newspapers in Baku subway station kiosks, according to local and international press reports collected by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The ban affected Hurriyet, Azadliq, Yeni Musavat, Bizim Yol, and Yeni Zaman. The mechanism was contractual: the Metropolitan renewed distribution contracts quarterly, and firms were told renewal depended on not selling the opposition titles. The same day, the Prosecutor General's Office accused several opposition outlets of insulting President Heydar Aliyev and calling for chaos and the forcible seizure of power. The ban was lifted on 22 May 2003 after journalists and press-freedom activists threatened a protest, as a Hurriyat journalist, Idzhat Huseynov, told the Committee. The paper also had a correspondent, Vidadi Bayramov, among the journalists barred or insulted at polling stations on the October 2003 election day, according to Reporters Without Borders.

October–November 2003: seizures and the state printers' refusal

The fullest documentation of pressure on Hürriyyət concerns the weeks after the presidential election of 15 October 2003, which brought Ilham Aliyev to the presidency. During the week after the protest demonstrations of 15 and 16 October, journalists from the opposition papers, including Khurriyet, were barred from parliament. Tens of thousands of copies of Yeni Musavat, Azadliq, Khurriyet, and Baki Khaber were seized from newsstands in Baku and the provinces on 17 and 18 October. On 17 October, two days after the election, the state printers refused to print Azadliq, Yeni Musavat, Baki Khaber, Khurriyet, and Yeni Zaman/Novoye Vremya; Human Rights Watch counted six opposition titles refused, including Novoe Vremya. The printers' management said employees refused to handle pro-opposition papers and that the newspapers owed too much money, while continuing to print other, pro-government papers also in debt. The five papers then failed to appear between 14 and 20 November, when Chap Evi, the only private printers willing to print them, ran out of paper; the editors accused the authorities of creating an artificial newsprint shortage by doubling its price. The state press agreed to resume printing the opposition newspapers in January 2004.

Distribution and money: the Qasid dispute

Printing was only one chokepoint. Reporters Without Borders recorded that opposition journalists maintained that the state distribution company Qasid regularly held back copies of newspapers it was supposed to distribute throughout the country, and that Khurriyet's editor Vugar Mamedov said Qasid also held back proceeds from the newspaper's sales and owed Khurriyet about 80 million manats, about 13,000 euros at the time. Police harassment of street vendors and confiscation of newspapers from them were also reported. In January 2004 the International Press Institute documented a related episode: the private Chap Evi press, which printed most opposition newspapers, lost its electricity for days, leaving Hurriyyet and its fellow opposition dailies unprinted — an episode the press's owner described as an attempt to force all newspapers back to the state press and bankrupt the independent printers. Together these accounts show a newspaper whose survival depended on contested printing, distribution, and payment channels at every step between newsroom and reader.

Suspension in 2004

In 2004 Hürriyyət had to suspend publishing due to financial burdens and government harassment, which led to difficulties distributing and selling the newspaper outside Baku, according to Human Rights Watch's reporting on Azerbaijan. The suspension was described in economic and distributional terms rather than as a court-ordered closure: fines, debts, blocked distribution, and withheld proceeds made continued publication impossible for a period. Human Rights Watch's account placed the paper's experience within a general system in which authorities used informal measures — limited access to printing presses and distribution networks, crippling fines from government-initiated defamation cases, and harassment of journalists — to prevent or limit news critical of the government from reaching the public. Yeni Musavat was similarly forced to suspend briefly in December 2004 and January 2005, indicating that Hürriyyət's suspension formed part of a wider post-election contraction of the opposition press rather than an isolated business failure.

2006: the "back rent" case

Hürriyyət returned to the international record in December 2006, when, days after the suspension of broadcasts by an independent television and radio station and the eviction of an opposition party and pro-opposition media from their downtown Baku offices, the State Property Committee initiated court proceedings against the newspaper for failure to pay rent. EurasiaNet reported that the committee sought overdue rent on a building near Baku's May 28 subway station that the Democratic Party and Hürriyyət had occupied since the party's early years. The report explicitly identified Hürriyyət as a publication financed by the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan and in print since 1992, and it framed the lawsuit as another instance of administrative and financial pressure on the opposition and its media. The outcome of the rent proceedings is not stated in the sources consulted for this profile, and no later resolution is asserted here.

What kind of newspaper it was

From the documented record, Hürriyyət's identity can be stated with confidence in outline and only in outline. It was an Azerbaijani opposition newspaper in Baku, tied to and financed by the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, publishing since 1992, edited in the documented years by Aydin Guliyev and then Vuqar Mammadov, and recognised internationally not for any single investigation but for its persistence inside a hostile operating environment. Details that a full profile would normally give — its exact founding circumstances in 1992, its frequency at each period, its circulation, its price and format, and its day-to-day editorial line beyond opposition to the government — are not established in the reliable sources consulted. This profile therefore does not supply them. The paper's historical significance, on the evidence available, lies less in a documented editorial catalogue than in how completely its treatment was documented by others.

Documentation limits and current status

Researchers should note the shape of the evidence for Hürriyyət. The paper is richly documented for 2001 to 2006 by Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Press Institute, and EurasiaNet, because it was a party to emblematic press-freedom episodes. It is poorly documented in ordinary reference sources: no encyclopedia entry, circulation audit, or verified publishing history after 2006 was available to this profile, and the paper's present-day frequency, format, and print status could not be verified from reliable sources. Accordingly, this profile does not describe Hürriyyət as either closed or currently publishing on a stated schedule; it records the verified core — Baku opposition newspaper, Democratic Party financed, in print since 1992, suspended under pressure in 2004, sued over rent in 2006 — and leaves the later record openly unresolved rather than padded with assumption.