What experiences can the director of MIA exchange with the satrap of Azerbaijan?

In another telling case of the banality of evil, the director of a prime minister's office called the Media and Information Agency stated that he met in Azerbaijan with his "counterpart," the director of an Azerbaijani agency criticized as violating human rights and freedom of speech, "to exchange experiences."

The incident is very banal and perhaps I am exaggerating by dealing with it. It's just that the suffering of journalists and the general public, despite the fact that this happens in a distant country and despite the fact that we do not know the sufferers personally, should not go unnoticed.

We are talking about this post by Alteo Hysi, director of Prime Minister Edi Rama's Media and Communication Agency, an agency widely criticized as an anti-democratic instrument and its anti-democratic practice, a post in which Hysi announces that he met with his "counterpart", the director of a government agency in Azerbaijan, a dictatorial country, assessed as such by the most important freedom institutions, such as Freedom House, an American organization that is largely funded by the State Department.

Hysi states in his status that he discussed "joint projects" and "exchange of experiences" with his Azerbaijani "counterpart."

Azerbaijan is a dictatorship, and Hys's Azerbaijani "counterpart" is one of the dictator's satraps, who has held power since 2003 after inheriting it from his father. I'm not saying this, Freedom House is saying it.

 The organization considers Azerbaijan to be a “consolidated authoritarian regime, an unfree country in which internet traffic is controlled.”

Moreover, the report says, Azerbaijan passed a law in 2017 that gives the government the right to block access to websites without a court order, as Rama wanted to do in Albania. Azerbaijan is a country where journalists are arrested and imprisoned, on trumped-up charges.

A journalist reported that he was summoned for questioning after some of his statements on social media and that investigators had threatened to rape him. And a 2022 law makes journalism a profession licensed by the government. The institution that issues licenses is the Media Development Agency, and this agency is the one whose head Hysi refers to as “colleague.”

Hysi rightly has to go all the way to Azerbaijan to find a "colleague" because his institution has no counterpart in any democratic country.

He cannot go, for example, to Italy, France, Germany, England, the United States, and other democratic countries to find some state office that controls the internet, supervises journalism, and imprisons journalists.

 And shaking hands with a rapist and calling him "homolog" really says a lot about the banality of evil.

/ Gjergj Erebara / BIRN