Aliyev’s cronies respond with coordinated attack on JusticeForNovikova sites

At request of Aliyev’s partner’s British lawyers, CNN has censored links to videos of JusticeForNovikova protests.

Rakhat Aliyev’s family members and business partners have begun a coordinated attack on the campaign to bring Anastasiya Novikova’s murderers to justice.

They began by convincing Facebook and CNN to censor content that criticizes them.

Their British lawyers did so by using the United Kingdom’s draconian and antiquated anti-libel legal traditions to ban the links and videos from being seen in Britain.* They apparently seek to use the threat of costly litigation in the UK to censor criticism of them on the Internet worldwide.

On December 11-12, Facebook responded by censoring the Prosecute Aliyev Facebook page in the UK. Facebook banned links, images and videos deemed critical of Aliyev’s brother-in-law Issam Hourani (Khorani) and Issam’s brother, Devincci Hourani.

Facebook warned that it would de-activate the Prosecute Aliyev page and the related user accounts if further offensive content was posted.

Facebook also censored its British users from links to the @ProsecuteAliyev page on Twitter.

Both Houranis are Aliyev’s business partners.

They are suspected of being material participants in the murder of Anastasiya Novikova in 2004, where they owned the apartment where the young women was held captive, tortured and raped. She “fell” to her death from the apartment balcony.

Also on December 11-12, CNN responded to the British lawyers by censoring videos of Justice for Novikova protests in London and in Vienna, Austria.

The protests were uploaded to CNN iReport, a hosting service that CNN says is devoted to “citizen journalism” to bring out news that otherwise would not be reported.

Links to those videos – including the November 16 “Get the Murderers Out of London” protest – are now dead.

Twitter has not taken any censorship action. At least not yet.

Issam and Devincci Hourani have become sensitive to recent publicity that, in 2013, a United States federal judge threw out their defamation case “with prejudice,” partly in regard to forged documents that the Houranis used to file their case. On the last page of his 2013 ruling, the judge said the Houranis’ case was “without merit.”

Below is a gallery of the warnings from Facebook and dead links from CNN.

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*Britain’s libel laws were so draconian that Parliament overhauled them in 2013. Criminals from all over the world practiced “libel tourism” to use British courts as jurisdiction to file harassing litigation against their critics – even if neither the critics nor the criminals were citizens or residents of the United Kingdom. Although the law has changed, companies like Facebook and CNN are still reactive to British lawyers and their libel-tourist clients. Rakhat Aliyev is not a citizen of the UK. Issam Hourani was born in Lebanon and holds a British passport and reportedly a Palestinian diplomatic passport. Devincci Hourani was also born in Lebanon and holds an American passport and reportedly a Palestinian diplomatic passport.

British lawyers for Aliyev’s accomplices have begun to succeed at pressuring Facebook and CNN to censor information about them.