A court in Azerbaijan on September 7 sentenced the prominent human rights defender and election monitor Anar Mammadli to 13 years in prison following a trial marred by serious due process violations. His co-defendant, civic activist Anar Abdullayev, received a 12-year sentence.
Mammadli, 48, spent more than two years in pretrial detention before the Baku Grave Crimes Court convicted him on politically motivated charges including currency smuggling, illegal entrepreneurship, tax evasion, money laundering, and document forgery.
The proceedings raise serious fair trial concerns. The court repeatedly rejected the defense’s requests to scrutinize prosecution evidence, question key witnesses in open court, and address inconsistencies in the case materials. Mammadli was also repeatedly denied release on bail.
Mammadli chairs the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Centre, Azerbaijan's only remaining independent election monitoring group. He has monitored elections and documented electoral violations for more than two decades and was a founding member of the Climate of Justice Initiative, a civil society coalition established ahead of the COP29 climate conference in Baku in November 2024.
This is Mammadli's second imprisonment. Azerbaijani authorities arrested him in 2013 and sentenced him in 2014 to five-and-a-half years in prison on similarly dubious finance-related charges. In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights found that his detention had been intended to silence and punish him for his election-monitoring work.
While imprisoned, Mammadli received the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 2014. He was released by presidential pardon in 2016.
Mammadli’s conviction comes amid an intensifying government assault on independent civil society and media. In July, a court imposed 12 to 15-year prison sentences on nine journalists and media workers affiliated with Toplum TV. In 2025, AbzasMedia journalists received sentences of up to nine years, while the authorities continued prosecuting journalists and activists associated with other independent outlets and civic groups.
Azerbaijan’s international partners should make clear that deepening political and economic ties cannot come at the expense of human rights and call for the immediate and unconditional release of Mammadli and Abdullayev. The Council of Europe should insist that Azerbaijan fully implement European Court of Human Rights judgments concerning politically motivated prosecutions and freedom of association, including by carrying out the legal and institutional reforms needed to prevent similar abuses.
