Moscow-born Israeli Blogger Alexander Lapshin who had been under arrest for a month in Belarus, was extradited from Belarus to Azerbaijan Tuesday morning, APA reported. Lapshin has written critical posts against Azerbaijan and its president, Ilham Aliyev, recently, and so the Azeris want him over for a discussion.
Lapsin was met and escorted from the airport by the officers of State Security Service of Azerbaijan.
Lapshin holds Russian, Israeli, and Ukrainian passports, and, according to APA, in 2011 and 2012 violated Azerbaijan’s travel laws. He also made statements “against Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity.”
According to the CIA World Factbook, the dispute over the break-away Nagorno-Karabakh region and the Armenian military occupation of surrounding lands in Azerbaijan remains the primary focus of regional instability. Residents have evacuated the former Soviet-era small ethnic enclaves in Armenia and Azerbaijan, and local border forces struggle to control the illegal transit of goods and people across the porous, un-demarcated Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian borders.
The Azeri Prosecutor General’s Office has opened a criminal case against Lapsin on articles 281.2 (public calls directed against the state) and 318.2 (illegal crossing border of the Azerbaijan Republic), and issued an international arrest warrant for him. Lapsin was detained in Belarus, where a deputy of Belarus’s prosecutor general justified Azerbaijan’s demand for his extradition.
Lapshin appealed to the Minsk city court, but the court upheld the Prosecutor General’s decision. Lapshin appealed the verdict, and the Belarus Supreme Court dismissed the appeal.