An Azerbaijani court on Wednesday rejected an appeal by two bloggers jailed after satirizing the government with an Internet video that showed a donkey giving a press conference, their lawyer said.
The bloggers' case intensified concerns about media freedoms in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich mainly Muslim republic on the Caspian Sea that has repeatedly been accused of curbing free speech.
The court's decision was immediately condemned by international rights groups, including Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
"We asked the court to exonerate the bloggers as they committed no crimes. However the appeal court has decided to uphold the earlier court ruling," lawyer Isakhan Ashurov told AFP.
The two bloggers, Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli, were arrested and jailed on hooliganism charges last year shortly after posting the video, which lampooned ex-Soviet Azerbaijan's docile press and statements by government officials.
Hajizade, 26, was jailed for two years and Milli, 30, for two-and-a-half years.
Ashurov said he would now appeal to Azerbaijan's Supreme Court and then to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if the appeal is again rejected.
Amnesty International decried the court's ruling, saying in a statement that the two bloggers "have fallen victim to the increasingly repressive measures taken by the Azerbaijani authorities to crack down on critics of the government".
The Committee to Protect Journalists said it was "deeply bothered" by the case and called for the release of the two bloggers.
"Though the charges and subsequent trial against the two bloggers have been laughable in their absurdity, there is nothing comic about our colleagues' imprisonment," the CPJ said in a statement.
The charges related to a scuffle in a Baku restaurant but the bloggers and rights groups say the arrests were politically motivated.
Authorities have said the charges are unrelated to the bloggers' criticism of the government.
Human rights groups and some analysts said the jailing of the two bloggers was intended as a warning to anti-government activists using the Internet.
Hajizade, co-founder of the OL (To Be) youth movement, and Milli, co-founder of online television channel AN Network, are both Western-educated children of opposition activists at the centre of a growing circle of young people using the Internet to criticise Azerbaijan's authorities.
Using sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the activists posted news updates, critical essays and satirical videos, offering an alternative to Azerbaijan's mainstream television and newspapers, which critics allege are under strict government control.
European Union representatives, the media freedom group Reporters Without Borders and the UN Human Rights Committee all raised concerns about the arrests of the bloggers.
Dozens of journalists in Azerbaijan have been jailed in recent years under laws that make libel a criminal offence, rather than a civil matter, as in many Western countries.
The country has also come under fire for adopting restrictive media laws and for banning foreign broadcasts, effectively ending local-language broadcasts by the BBC, Voice of America and Radio Liberty.
Copyright 2010 AFP Global Edition
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