Baku- Azerbaijan on Thursday jailed a leading opponent of strongman President Ilham Aliyev for four years and three months, in a move his party and rights groups slammed as politically motivated.   A court in capital Baku found the deputy chairman of the anti-government Musavat party Tofig Yagublu guilty of hooliganism, his daughter Nigyar Hazi told AFP. Human Rights Watch denounced the verdict as a “travesty of justice” and urged the Azerbaijani government to “immediately free” Yagublu. His prosecution followed the Azerbaijani government’s “longstanding pattern of pursuing trumped-up charges against government critics in order to silence them,” HRW added. Musavat party leader Arif Gajily said that “Yagublu’s prosecution is a revenge for his political activities” and marked the “complete collapse of the judicial system in Azerbaijan.” In his closing arguments on Wednesday, Yagublu, 59, denounced “serious violations” during the court hearings and said police had previously threatened him with an arrest “if I don’t stop criticising the president.”

Prosecutors had accused Yagublu of physically assaulting a married couple with whom he was involved in a car accident. “My parked car was demonstratively hit (by another car) and then they (the people in the other car) attacked me,” Yagublu wrote on Facebook prior to his arrest on March 22. An ardent critic of Aliyev’s rights record, Yagublu was sentenced in 2014 to five years in prison.
He served two years behind bars and was released in 2016 as part of an amnesty, along with 14 other jailed rights activists and opposition politicians. Any display of public discontent and political dissent usually meets a tough government response in ex-Soviet Azerbaijan. President Aliyev has ruled the energy-rich Caspian Sea nation since 2003, succeeding his father Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB officer and communist-era leader.