US Representative Anna Paulina Luna has introduced a bill in Congress to end the restriction on aid to Azerbaijan.
Luna’s bill, entitled ‘To repeal a restriction on assistance to Azerbaijan’, was introduced on Tuesday.
The legislation will now be forwarded to the House Foreign Affairs committee.
The Freedom Support Act was initially designed to promote the establishment of democratic governance and a free market economy in Russia and other newly independent states after the collapse of the USSR. Separate clauses for humanitarian, security, and anti-terrorism support were later added.
In October 1992, Congress amended the Freedom Support Act — section 907 — prohibiting any form of direct US assistance to the Azerbaijani government in response to lobbying efforts by the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), which cited Azerbaijan’s blockade of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.
According to the amendment, the US president ‘may not provide assistance to the government of Azerbaijan and local governments under this or any other law unless he determines and reports to Congress that the government of Azerbaijan has taken steps to lift the blockade and other use of force against Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.’ Thus, Azerbaijan was the only post-Soviet country that did not benefit from the Freedom Support Act, at least until 2001, when the bill was amended so that the president has the authority to temporarily waive the restrictions. Since then, it has been waived several times, though the restrictions were never entirely removed.
As part of the historic meeting between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and US President Donald Trump in Washington in August 2025, Trump authorised section 907 to be temporarily waived, but not fully removed, which can only be done by an act of Congress.
Luna has not made public comments on her decision to put forward the bill, which was welcomed in Azerbaijani media.
A member of Congress from Florida, she has long been a close ally of Trump, and is considered to be one of the more pro-Russian members of the House.
Separately, on Wednesday, Luna said she would co-sponsor a bill put forth by her Republican colleague Thomas Massie to withdraw the US from NATO.
Nate Ostiller
