On 18 November, the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan considered the appeal by the Azerbaijani prisoner of conscience, opposition leader Ilgar Mammadov, against his seven year-long prison sentence, and ruled to uphold it. This not only keeps in prison a person who never should have been placed there in the first place, but also contravenes Azerbaijan’s explicit legal obligations, and is an affront to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe which has repeatedly demanded that Azerbaijan complies with the 2014 decision by the European Court of Human Rights and immediately sets Ilgar Mammadov free.
