Anar Mammadli, human rights defender and election monitor, Baku, Azerbaijan, February 6, 2024.
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
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