Azerbaijan Accuses Rights Activist of Spying for Armenia

Azerbaijani authorities said Thursday that prominent human rights activist Leyla Yunus, who has been charged with treason, was collaborating with the spy agencies of arch-enemy Armenia.

"It is established that in 2002 Leyla Yunus and her husband Arif Yunus... had trained the journalist Rauf Mirkadirov in espionage and has since organized several of his trips to Armenia," the Azeri prosecutor general's office said in a statement.

It said that Arif Yunus, an independent political analyst, had joined several of the trips where they met with Armenian intelligence officials.

It charged that via Mirkadirov, who was arrested and charged with treason in April, Leyla and Arif Yunus had been able to pass on to Armenian intelligence photographs of maps showing the location of military units, airfields and other strategic sites.

Yunus, 57, an award-winning campaigner, was charged on Wednesday with treason, tax evasion, large-scale fraud and falsifying documents, according to her lawyer Dzhavad Dzhavadov.

Her 59-year-old husband was charged with treason and fraud.

A fierce critic of Azerbaijan’s poor rights record, Yunus is head of one of Azerbaijan's leading rights groups, the Institute for Peace and Democracy in Baku.

She has won several foreign prizes and honors for her work.

Yunus has long worked with Armenian activists advocating the reconciliation of the two countries, which have been locked in a decades-long conflict over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh region.

The Azeri prosecutor general's office also accused Yunus of carrying out propaganda activities aimed at getting Azerbaijan to recognize Armenia's possession of Nagorny Karabakh following the 1988-1994 fighting that left over 30,000 dead.

Any display of dissent in Azerbaijan is usually met with a tough government response.

Rights groups say the government has been clamping down on opponents since President Ilham Aliyev's election to a third term last year.