Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 8
By Elmira Tariverdiyeva – Trend:
Hysteria raised by Armenian government officials and the so-called expert community due to the extradition of blogger Alexander Lapshin to Azerbaijan, has come in handy for Baku. That’s because from now on, anyone willing to violate Azerbaijan’s border will think twice before doing it.
Lapshin, who is a citizen of three countries and who violated the Azerbaijani border, was extradited from Belarus to Azerbaijan Feb. 7.
Lapshin was detained not for visiting the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, but for his subsequent entering the country. Lapshin, knowing that he is banned to enter Azerbaijan after visiting the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region, and, even after posting inappropriate jokes in his blog on this occasion, for some reason, still came to Baku.
He passed the Azerbaijani state border control using the Ukrainian passport with a different spelling of his name.
Taking advantage of this, he didn’t simply arrive in Azerbaijan, but also began to write in his blog about the bribes he allegedly gave at the border service, and smear the country he illegally entered.
First, why did Lapshin need to fly to Baku if he had such sympathy for the Armenians and the illegal regime of Nagorno-Karabakh? Second, if everything is so easily solved in Azerbaijan by giving bribes, why not arrive in the country by showing the passport Lapshin used while travelling to the Nagorno-Karabakh region? Third, what was Lapshin trying to prove by knowingly violating the law on crossing Azerbaijan’s border?
It is strange to hear that when talking about Lapshin, some people mention the notion of the “freedom of speech”. What does freedom of speech have to do with a blogger who violated a country’s law?
Can anyone having a blog violate the laws with impunity? Will the author of the food blog, for example, avoid liability for stealing the products in the shop?
Perhaps, the author of the food blog just wanted to write about low quality products or a high price? Can it be attached to the freedom of speech? If so, it is possible to advise to any drug dealer or smuggler to create a blog just in case.
The extradition of Lapshin is a very important precedent. The story of his extradition testifies to the fact that no crime will remain unpunished, in particular, such a dangerous crime nowadays as a call for separatism or illegal crossing of borders.
If the attempts of such offenders as Lapshin to violate international law all over the world are not foiled, very dire consequences can occur.
The international law does not give ground to alternative versions. It is fact that Armenia occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijani territories and created puppet criminal de facto regime in Nagorno-Karabakh area.
Alas, today Karabakh is one of the precedents of the illegal occupation by Armenia.
For some reason the people not well-informed about the situation persistently call the illegal occupation as "separation". If today the world does not properly respond to such atrocities and calls for separatism by such offenders as Lapshin in the toughest, but the legal way, tomorrow the whole world, and, first of all, Europe, can turn into an area with ever-warring petty countries.
As for the request for extradition, then there is need to understand one important thing for Baku. From now on, any corrupt politician not well-informed about the situation and willing to visit the occupied territories of Azerbaijan without Baku’s permission will think about a possibility of facing legal prosecution by the Azerbaijani side.
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Elmira Tariverdiyeva is the head of Trend Agency's Russian News Service