Azerbaijan, Baku, 27 August / Trend corr. K.Zarbaliyeva / Signed by the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, the pardon decree was implemented in the first half of 27 August.
Organized by the Penitentiary Service (PS), four groups visited prisons to implement the decree at the instruction of the Justice Ministry. Trend correspondent participated with one of the groups in implementation of the decree at prisons 1, 6, 10 and children education institutions.
According to Huseyn Alikhanov, the deputy chief of the PS, the last - 45th pardon decree affects 96 prisoners. Ten of them were not sentenced to jail.
Alikhanov said that the pardon decree affected prisoners, who served more than half of his/her punishment, admitted their crime and were sorry for their action, and prisoners who behaved excellently during prison service.
According to Malik Alakbarov, the chief of the Inspection on prison service of the Justice Ministry, 86 pardoned people were prisoners, who served their punishment at prisons. The rest ten people were not sentenced to jail, three of them got conditional sentence, three were fined and decision of the court concerning four women was cancelled.
In accordance of the pardon decree, two prisoners of the children education institution, two from prison 1 (one of them is a former national hero Rasim Akbarov, who was sentenced to 15-year imprisonment) and three from prison 6 were freed.
The youngest man amongst pardoned people is 17-year old Yusif Guliyev and the oldest - 77-year old Aziz Huseynov.
In accordance with 45 signed pardon decrees, 4,858 people have been freed since 1994. Ilham Aliyev signed 13 decrees and National Leader Heydar Aliyev - 32 decrees. Eight amnesty acts, which have been signed up to now, affected 40,000 prisoners.
Civil activists, representatives of media, members of the Pardon Commission, ombudsman Elmira Suleymanova and employees of the Justice Ministry and the PS participated in implementation of the pardon decree.
The correspondent can be contacted at [email protected]