Watchdog

BAKU -- An Azerbaijani blogger known for reports seeking to document corruption has been convicted of libel and sentenced to two years in prison.

A court in Baku convicted Mehman Huseynov of libel on March 3 for statements he made about police.

Huseynov and his lawyer Elcin Sadiqov said the verdict and sentence are politically motivated.

Huseynov was detained on January 9 and found guilty the following day of resisting police.

Police filed libel charges against Huseynov after he said on January 10 that officers had beaten him and demanded he stop his anticorruption activities.

In December and January, Huseynov had posted photographs of luxury homes he alleged belonged to government officials and lawmakers.

Human rights groups accuse long-ruling President Ilham Aliyev's government of fabricating criminal cases to stifle dissent and media freedom in the oil-producing Caspian Sea country.

An Uzbek court has upheld an additional five-year prison sentence for Agzam Farmonov, a long-jailed human rights activist whose 2006 extortion conviction was widely seen as politically motivated.

Defense lawyer Abdurahman Tashanov told RFE/RL on March 2 that the Supreme Court of Uzbekistan's Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakistan rejected an appeal against the five-year extension of Farmonov's prison term.

The ruling went against a trend in which courts in the tightly controlled Central Asian country have freed inmates in politically charged cases when their sentences expire, departed from the long-common practice of extending prison terms.

Farmonov, 39, was convicted and sentenced to 9 1/2 years in jail in 2006. He led a branch of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan in the eastern Sirdaryo region at the time of his arrest, which supporters say was groundless punishment for his activism.

Weeks before he was due for release in 2016, his prison term was extended by five years and 26 days for what the authorities said was "bad behavior while in custody."