“The courtroom bore little resemblance to the one I’d seen earlier out in the Baku suburbs last week. The room, with walls painted green to about four feet and then off-white to the ceiling, was about 20 feet wide and 70 feet long. It was dominated by a cage about seven feet high, five feet deep and 20-25 feet long. Ten prisoners of various ages, all dressed in their own street clothes (almost certainly, the same they had been wearing when arrested two or more months before), sat in a long row along the bench at the back of the cage. A few were handcuffed; one had leg manacles. The three judges were seated behind a bench piled high in briefs, books and papers, at the far end of the room, under a seal of the country and next to the national flag (the only items required by law in an Azerbaijan courtroom). Below the bench and to the judges’ left was a desk for the clerk of court. Opposite the clerk’s desk was the desk for the chief prosecutor, facing the clerk’s desk and perpendicular to the judge’s bench. In a row from the prosecutor’s desk along one side of the narrow room were desks for the “advocates”—the criminal lawyers. (They are specially licensed by the “law syndicate” to practice criminal law and there are only 350 in the entire country). I heard that they charge huge fees in order to bribe judges in “regular trials” but in political trials, that possibility is foreclosed. (Heard it from a prosecutor who is quite biased). If they are snagged as public defenders, they get a “fee” of $1 per hour, but 50 cents of that goes to pay taxes. Thus, if they are serving as public defenders, they want the cases to end mercifully quickly so they get back to paying cases…
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