Explainer | One year on in Azerbaijan’s crackdown on independent media

November 2023 was a black month for journalists working for Azerbaijan’s  independent media outlet and OC Media partner AbzasMedia, marking the beginning of a renewed crackdown against independent media.

On 20 November 2023, police raided the offices of AbzasMedia, claiming to have found €40,000 ($44,000) in cash during their search.

Earlier that day, both the media site’s director, Ulvi Hasanli, and its deputy director, Mahammad Kekalov, were detained at their homes. Hasanli alleged that he was beaten by the police, and was seen at the raid with a bruised face. 

At the time, AbzsasMedia accused the authorities of planting the money in order to falsify charges against Hasanli, highlighting Hasanli’s investigative work on corruption in Azerbaijan.

AbzasMedia has published a number of investigations, which have revealed illegality at all layers of government, likely displeasing Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Indeed, ten years ago, Aliyev made a similar decision to punish the journalists who exposed his and his family’s illicit businesses, labelling them ‘foreign-funded’ and moving to shut them down.

On 21 November, the outlet’s editor-in-chief, Sevinj Vagifgizi, was arrested at the airport after returning from a work trip. Her house was also raided, but the police did not confiscate anything. 

After these three arrests, the remaining AbzasMedia staff were interrogated, and journalists who had written for the outlet were given travel bans.

On 1 December, Nargiz Absalamova became the first employee outside AbzasMedia’s top management to be detained, after she refused to cooperate with the police investigation. 

Two weeks later, journalist Hafiz Bababali was the second employee to be detained after police summons. 

During his first interrogation on 9 December, Bababali asked the investigator why the Baku City Police Department’s windows were dirty, noting that the police had paid for such cleaning according to the public procurement portal. He then published his accusations of corruption on social media, after which he was arrested during his second interrogation on 13 December. 

Elnara Gasimova, the last journalist to be arrested in the AbzasMedia case, was detained on 13 January. 

In addition to AbzasMedia employees, family members of the journalists were also faced with restrictions, including having their bank accounts frozen and social pensions cut. 

The six detained AbzasMedia employees have since remained in pre-trial detention, with extensions regularly granted by the courts. On 19 August, new charges were filed against them, including illegal entrepreneurship, smuggling by criminal means in the form of an organised gang, forgery, and tax evasion. These charges are punishable by imprisonment of up to 12 years. 

The challenges faced in prison

Since being detained, multiple AbzasMedia employees have written letters revealing the torture and abuse they, and others, have faced while in pre-trial detention. 

According to Hasanli, who has written a number of such letters published on the media outlet’s website, any instances of physical abuse and any other violations are justified by the prison guards, who claimed that if a prisoner stated he was being beaten, then maybe he also was engaged in something against the rules, which is why he was beaten in the first place. 

‘When a prisoner is searched, it is known how much money he has, and a large part of it is taken from him by force. Then the prisoner is sent to solitary. The rest of the money is confiscated there under the pretext that “money cannot be carried into it” ’, Hasanli wrote.

He also noted the corruption scheme in place at Baku’s pre-trial detention centre, citing circumstances where people were only given items from their family members if they paid a bribe. 

‘The Pre-Trial Detention Centre, designed for 2,500 people, holds about 4,000 prisoners. The fact that there are too many prisoners is not an excuse. It is not the prisoners’ fault’, Hasanli noted.

Hasanli highlighted that the centre is mandated to provide care towards all the prisoners, receiving ₼140 million ($82 million) from the state budget annually. Yet, Hasanli has written, ‘the condition of the ventilation, heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, and water supply is poor. Water is provided twice a day for an hour. Hot water is only provided once a week for 2–3 hours’.

As a result of this letter, Hasanli was punished by the head of the pre-trial detention centre, Elnur Ismailov, and was given additional restrictions. 

In turn, Vagifgizi, Gasimova, and Absalamova have highlighted their own living conditions in the women’s centre. 

In June, Vagifgizi tried to speak out about a case of women prisoners being tortured. 

‘Women are threatened with torture, and if you don’t keep calm, they will pull you by the hair. A guard named Mahir also threatens women with rape in the pre-trial detention centre’, she said in a phone call. 

However, the call was interrupted after prison authorities realised what she was saying. 

Additional restrictions were imposed on the imprisoned AbzasMedia employees ahead of COP29, the UN conference on climate change hosted in Baku on 11–22 November. 

Once again, when Vagifgizi called her mother to tell her about these restrictions, the phone call was interrupted. 

‘Due to COP29, our phone conversations with family have been limited to two minutes. They believe this is sufficient for families to know that their loved ones are safe and sound. Additionally, phone conversations will cease at 14:00. Open meetings have been cancelled altogether, and all foreign TV channels have been stopped in the prison’, Vagifqizi told her mother before the call was cut. 

On 14 November, Vagifgizi, Gasimova, and Absalamova claimed that they had been subjected to physical violence after complaining about poor ventilation.

‘Sevinj said that some inmates, including individuals with epilepsy and pregnant women, began to experience severe breathing difficulties due to the lack of fresh air. As the situation worsened, detainees demanded the windows on the prison doors be opened by banging on the doors, with Sevinj leading the protest’, Sevinc’s mother, Ofeliya Maharramova, told AbzasMedia.

‘A guard named Aziza Mammadova partially opened the prison door window of the cell where Sevinj is kept and yelled at her. When Sevinj attempted to prevent the prison door window from being closed by sticking her arm out, Mammadova slammed it shut, injuring Sevinj’s arm. Nargiz and Elnara were subjected to the same violence as well,’ Maharramova added.

The continuation of a prolonged media crackdown 

The raid on AbzasMedia in 2023 was a continuation of a crackdown on independent media which began in 2012. That year, investigative journalist Khadija Ismail was blackmailed with intimate footage after she investigated the corruption of state officials. 

The following year, the Azerbaijani government passed an amendment regulating grants so that only a limited list of institutions approved by the government were entitled to provide grants to Azerbaijani organisations and individuals. 

Former lawyer Yalchin Imanov explained to independent news agency Turan that the amendments to the laws on non-governmental organisations and grants meant that standard funding could now be classed as smuggling. 

He added that Azerbaijan’s free media and independent civil society organisations had been ‘deprived of […] the only guarantee of their existence’.

Thus began Azerbaijan’s total crackdown on civil society and media. 

In 2021, a new media regulation was adopted, according to which all media organisations should be registered in the Media Development Agency’s system. In addition, the process for the government to revoke media licences was made easier. 

Independent media protested this law in December 2021. There were numerous reports of police brutality against protesters, including against AbzasMedia journalist Nargiz Absalamova, whose tailbone was broken during the demonstrations. Many of the media workers who took part in the protests have since been detained or hit with travel bans. 

The employees of AbzasMedia were not the only media workers detained by the authorities — a stream of arrests followed, starting with Aziz Orujov, one of the founders of the independent online TV station Kanal 13. 

Orujov was detained on 27 November 2023 on charges of building a house without a permit. 

After that was Kanal 13 anchor Rufat Muradli, who was detained on 2 December for failure to comply with police instructions.

On 6 March, the next independent media organisation in Azerbaijan was targeted — Toplum TV. That day, their offices were raided in a similar manner to AbzasMedia. 

The same day, the Azerbaijani opposition political group the Third Republican Platform reported that they were unable to contact three of their members — Akif Gurbanov, Ruslan Izzatli, and Araz Aliyev — the latter of whom was also a Toplum TV journalist.

Like in the AbzasMedia case, the remaining employees of the targeted media outlets were given travel bans. 

The cases against all of the independent journalists have remained open, each person’s pre-trial detention period continuously extended. By keeping Azerbaijan’s independent journalists imprisoned, whether physically in a cell or simply by not allowing them to leave the country, Aliyev has successfully stifled what was left of the country’s dissenting media.