Azerbaijan, Baku / corr. Trend U.Ismaylova / The Head of the Monitoring Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Edward Linter, stated on 21 May in Baku that the situation in the prisons of Azerbaijan has improved.
He stressed that the representatives of the Monitoring Committee came to such a conclusion after visiting prisons in Azerbaijan. In Azerbaijan there is one prison, 17 other penitentiaries, 3 investigation isolation units, one reformatory, one sanitation institution, 15 divisional institutions and 14 specialized institutions in Azerbaijan.
Linter added that the reasons for their detention are being studied to define whether they are political prisoners. In this regard, he positively assessed the pardon act. According the Presidential order dated 19 March, 11 people included in the list of political prisoners were devised by the representatives of the Government, Parliament and the NGOs and have been released.