The last time I saw Bahruz was in my kitchen in Tbilisi. He had asked if he could stay the night before heading back to Baku. He was calm, relieved even, and told me he had nothing to fear — he said that someone from the State Security Service (DTX) told him they had no problem with him; he could carry on with his life. He had already shown his phone to them without worry, because, as he said, he had no secrets to hide. We talked until the late hours, and in the morning, I set out bread, cheese, butter, jam, and tea on the table and rushed out. That meeting in my kitchen was our last. About a month later, he was arrested in Azerbaijan and remanded to pre-trial detention on charges of treason.
Every activist from Azerbaijan who is still free carries a hope that defies rational calculation. At every appeal hearing, in every violation that lawyers expose, in every last word a political prisoner speaks, in every pre-holiday pardon list we wait for, in every statement by international human rights organisations, we believe that maybe this will help one of our loved ones escape unlawful imprisonment. Even when every expectation has failed, hope has not left us.
One year after Bahruz’s unjust imprisonment, that hope sprouted again. Suddenly, everything he wanted for Armenia–Azerbaijan relations appeared on paper during a trilateral meeting between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and US President Donald Trump: a pledge not to use force against each other, to take measures to eliminate intolerance, racial hatred, and discrimination, to cooperate in economic, humanitarian, and cultural fields, and more. The very ideas that were taboo in our information space, the ideas almost no one dared to say aloud except for a handful of peace advocates like Bahruz, the ideas that seemed utopian until very recently, became legitimate at the state level.
But the facts are stark. On 23 June, the Baku Court of Grave Crimes sentenced Bahruz behind closed doors to 15 years in prison. He was sentenced for what was, in truth, his peace activism, after being falsely accused of treason. Even when the judgment was read, no proof of treason appeared in the record; we searched the file and found none. The obvious conclusion is that his only ‘crime’ was demanding peace before that became permissible.
After the verdict, Bahruz attempted to take his life and survived only because a cellmate intervened. He had also made an earlier attempt during pre-trial detention, which was not made public.
Bahruz could not bear that 15 years of freedom might be taken from him for his work to create peace. Most of his life has been spent in academia; he holds two master’s degrees and was pursuing a PhD — facing prison walls after that has been unbearable. In messages from prison, he told us he cannot keep up with academic updates and news and that this is its own kind of pain.
The days after those images from the White House appeared, I phoned Bahruz’s 82-year-old grandmother, Zibeyda. She asked me a question that sucked all the air out of the room: ‘What do you think, will I see Bahruz before my death?’ I told her to stay strong and to be strong for Bahruz. Later, when I hung up, I read the joint declaration again and tried to believe that language can open doors.
There is a second fact that matters here. Both Aliyev and Pashinyan said they would nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. If we are going to speak the language of prizes, then let us also speak the language of coherence. The world’s cameras are pointed at the Caucasus. Imagine the headline if we fail now. Imagine the disgrace if, in the middle of official peace, a peace activist dies in prison. There is no prize that can balance that.
This is not a plea. It is a statement of truth that follows from the state’s own documents. If Armenia and Azerbaijan have initialled a text that condemns intolerance and racial hatred, then jailing a researcher whose work has been about refusing hatred is an error that must be corrected. If Washington is celebrating diplomatic architecture, then there is a simple load-bearing pillar to add at home. Freeing Bahruz is not a concession — it is alignment.
The text that was initialled sets the standard. Article 8 commits both parties to combating intolerance and discrimination. Leaving a peace activist in prison contradicts the letter and spirit of that commitment and undermines confidence in the new policy line. Correcting the verdict on appeal or ending the case through lawful means would make the words on paper credible to the public who must live under them. Releasing a peaceful researcher also signals internal confidence.
There is also a human argument that I refuse to treat as secondary. Bahruz is tired. He has already reached for the worst exit twice. His mental state is fragile. Each time hope dims, he fades. If we are going to talk about peace as something real, then it cannot coincide with the death of a harmless peace activist in an Azerbaijani prison. The irony would be obscene. It would say to the world that we speak of reconciliation at the White House while burying the people who believed in it first.
Let me return to the person, because policy is supposed to be about people. Bahruz is the friend who sends links at midnight with his mock-dramatic ‘Horrific!’ and then waits for my rant. He is the one who rolls his eyes at my superhero films and then recommends a Godard scene to fix my taste. He is the reader who sometimes talks over me with too many books in his head. He is a Slavoj Žižek fan and a devoted arguer who sometimes mansplained to me. It was part of our friendship, and we loved to argue. Even from prison he kept his habit and sent word to his feminist friends that we should keep our distance from anti-human ideologies like Donna Haraway, that we should not cheer techno-optimism, that solidarity is not a gadget. I often miss these energetic ideological fights with him.
He is also the grandchild of a woman who keeps asking me if she will see him again. If the new peace is serious, there is a very small way to prove it. Let him walk out of a building, call his grandmother, drink tea, and argue about borders as administrative lines rather than existential ones.
It matters that words have changed. Officials now speak of opening transport routes, good-neighbourly relations, and rejecting revenge. The EU has welcomed the progress made, while analysts are writing about corridors and connectivity. Fine. Then let the political class also accept the moral arithmetic that follows. A state that chooses peace does not need to be afraid of a young scholar who wrote, taught, and spoke for it before the ink dried.
I know the replies by heart: ‘Courts are independent. He broke the law. We cannot interfere’. I have sat in those corridors too long to be persuaded by such recitations. Laws are written by people. Prosecutions are decisions. The same leadership that can initial a treaty can decline to treat contact as treason. This is not about leniency. It is about consistency.
A state that speaks of reconciliation does not keep a nonviolent researcher in a cell. His release is not a favour, not a bargain, not a gesture. It is the baseline that makes the rest believable.
