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EU meeting with Human Rights Defenders at Belgian embassy in Azerbaijan

13 April 2010 15:03 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Ramil Mammadli - APA. On April 12, 2010 the EU Presidency and EU delegation held a meeting in Baku with a number of local Human Rights NGO’s involved in a wide variety of fields with the aim of introducing the EU guidelines on HRD and of listening to the views and opinions of the participants in order to identify possible problems and constraints that will help the EU formulate its local HRD strategy for Azerbaijan, as it has been done in many other countries, including in the other countries of the South Caucasus, APA reports.

These guidelines have been adopted by the EU in order to streamline the protection to human rights defenders and set out concrete measures to further enhance assistance and protection to the human rights defenders all over the world. At this meeting, Ieva Kupce of the Office of the EUSR was introduced as designated liaison officer for HRD.

Human rights defenders are people, who individually or with others, act peacefully to promote or protect recognized political, civil, economic and other human rights. Playing an important role in ensuring the respect of all rights and the protection of victims, the human rights defenders should be allowed to act freely and without interference.

Note that, chairman of National Committee of Helsinki Civil Assembly Arzu Abdullayeva, chairman of Azerbaijani Committee against Tortures Elchin Behbudov, chairman of Citizen’s Labor Rights Protection League Sahib Mammadov, as well as members of the Monitoring Group of Rights Protection Organizations â€“ 23 NGO representatives have attended the meeting.