Eurovision activist arrested

Rasul Jafarov - who used the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest as focus for protests against the shitters who run Azerbaijan - has been arrested:

A prominent human rights campaigner in ex-Soviet Azerbaijan has been arrested and charged with economic crimes amid a new crackdown on dissidents, his lawyer said on Sunday.

A court in the capital Baku on Saturday ordered that Rasul Jafarov be held for three months after prosecutors charged him with tax evasion, illegal entrepreneurship and abuse of power, said his laywer.

It's obviously an amusing joke on the part of the Baku government to accuse people of "abuse of power". Like a premiership footballer accusing the team's cleaners of being overpaid.

Eurovision not quite such knockabout fun in Azerbaijan

You've got to hand it to the Azerbaijan government - their telephone voting scandals put Ant and Dec cramming ill-gotten gains into ITV's pockets in the shade. Turns out voting for Armenia didn't just cost 25p plus your standard network rate. There was another price to pay:

Rovshan Nasirli, a young Eurovision fan living in the Azerbaijani capital Baku, says he was summoned this week to the country’s National Security Ministry — to explain why he had voted for Armenia during this year’s competition in May.

“They wanted an explanation for why I voted for Armenia. They said it was a matter of national security,” Nasirli said. “They were trying to put psychological pressure on me, saying things like, ‘You have no sense of ethnic pride. How come you voted for Armenia?’ They made me write out an explanation, and then they let me go.”

It appears that Armenians who voted in the opposite direction - of whom there were substantially more - didn't get strong-armed.