Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan is located between Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Iran, and also borders the Caspian Sea. The country’s two largest neighbours, Russia and Iran, have shaped its history, dividing the territory multiple times. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, set up in 1918, was short-lived and marred by massive population movements and massacres between the Muslim and Christian populations. ¹ In 1920, the Red Army invaded Azerbaijan and incorporated it into the Soviet Union.

Seven decades later, with the Soviet Union collapsing, Azerbaijan declared sovereignty in 1989 and independence in 1991. Heydar Aliyev, a former head of the soviet intelligence service, took the reins of the country in a coup in 1993. He established what would become an autocratic dynasty. His son, Ilham Aliyev, is currently in power. In 2021, for good measure, he named his wife vice-president. Meydan TV, one of the few independent media in the country, described the move as the edification of a ruling dynasty. ²

“The government severely restricted freedoms of expression, assembly, and association. Despite some progress on a notorious torture case, torture and ill-treatment in police custody and places of detention persisted,” the Human Rights Watch World Report 2024 said. The authorities also engaged in the “violent crushing of two separate grassroots protests over environmental issues,” and independent organisations were unable to operate freely. ¹

Statewatch spoke with Azerbaijani human rights defenders in 2024, both of whom noted that a renewed crackdown had begun in November 2023. Subhan Hesenli, founder of Social Rights Center, an organisation advocating for social and economic rights in Azerbaijan, remembered vividly the day it started. He was flying back into the country with Sevinc Vagifgizi, the editor-in-chief of investigative outlet Abzas Media. They had just learned of the arrest of the outlet’s director, Ulvi Hasanli.

“When the door of the plane opened. That’s when the crackdown started,” he recalled. Police officers entered and took Vagifgizi into custody. In June 2025, both Vagifgizi and Hasanli were sentenced to nine years in jail. ²

Vagifgizi was the first female journalist to be arrested in Azerbaijan. Two more who worked for Abzas Media were soon to join their colleague in custody. For Gulnara Mehdiyeva, a feminist activist, this marked a shift. “Before the crackdown in November, the authority never arrested a woman for political activism,” she said. “But they are not afraid of anything anymore. They can arrest anyone.”

As well as jailing critics and opponents, Azerbaijan has been accused of committing genocide. The Nagorno-Karabakh region, with a significant Armenian population, was incorporated into Azerbaijan by the USSR. Armenians within Azerbaijan suffered from severe discrimination and attempted to break away and join Armenia in 1988, leading to a series of pogroms. The situation led to a full-scale war in the 90s when Nagorno-Karabakh broke away and formed the Republic of Artsakh. This lasted until 2023, when Azerbaijan led an offensive to retake the territory. The military campaign involved what a former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court described as a genocide against the Armenian population under Azerbaijani control. ³

Two months before the arrest of Sevinc Vagifgizi, Russia had brokered a ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan that halted the latter’s war on the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Part of the peace treaty included a rather curious disposition: Armenia promised it would not veto Azerbaijan’s bid to host the November 2024 COP 29 climate conference.⁴ This was the last piece preventing the country from getting permission to organise the event. While state, corporate and civil society delegates from across the world debated, the regime was busy jailing 300 political activists, including at least 25 journalists, according to Amnesty International. ⁵

Azerbaijan’s relationship with the United Nations has strongly focused on counter-terrorism. When at the helm of the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council in 2012 and 2014, the country focused on strengthening international cooperation on the issue. This was so well received that in 2013 the country hosted, in cooperation with several UN agencies and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, its first high-level international conference on counter-terrorism policies. Cooperation with the transnational security architecture has continued to flourish over the years. ¹

In January 2022, Vladanka Andreeva, the UN official responsible for coordination with the Azerbaijani government, tweeted a picture of her and two government officials cutting the ribbon of the new Passenger Information Centre in the capital, Baku. ¹ Six months later, Azerbaijan signed a memorandum of understanding with the UN’s Countering Terrorist Travel Programme. The aim was to:

…lay out the foundation of a strategic partnership to assist the Government of Azerbaijan to implement the programmatic roadmap for the use of the United Nations ‘goTravel’ technology in compliance with international law, in particular, international human rights, refugee and international humanitarian law. ²

The UN’s goTravel software enables the gathering of data on people travelling into the country in which it is deployed. The data is used for searching national and international police and security databases, and for fuelling automated profiling systems. In short, the UN sought to give powerful surveillance software to a dictatorship, for which airports are a key point of control. As well as arresting Sevinc Vagifgizi after her plane landed, political refugees deported from Germany have been arrested on arrival ³ and a Nobel nominee was prevented from leaving the country to attend an Italian literary festival. ⁴

By the time of the memorandum with the UN, the Azerbaijani authorities had already started setting up the technological infrastructure for monitoring travel. In 2014, the country equipped itself with “the industry’s most advanced technology” provided by SITA, the Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques, the self-described world’s leading specialist in air transport communications and information technology. ⁵

In 2017, the World Customs Organization gave a workshop to the Azerbaijani government on Advance Passenger Information (API) and Passenger Name Record (PNR) data. ⁶ A brochure of SITA to advertise its service to governments worldwide mentioned the completeness and accuracy of data “collected for a flight from London Heathrow (LHR) to Heydar Aliyev International Airport (GYD) in Azerbaijan.” ⁷

The country is among the few countries around the world where goTravel has been successfully deployed, according to the mid-term evaluation of the UNCT Travel Programme published in March 2023. ⁸ The fact that the software may have played a role in the arrest of Sevinc Vagifgizi is not mentioned in the report.

Azerbaijan has been a member of Interpol since 1992. The police agency says the country “sits strategically at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia,” and “takes part regularly in global INTERPOL-led police operations which focus on regional organized crime.” ¹

1In April 2009, Azer Samadov, an Azerbaijani refugee, was arrested in the Netherlands because of an Interpol red notice (a type of database alert that indicates someone is wanted for arrest). It took four years for Interpol’s own oversight body, the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files, to act on the case and remove the alert for being politically motivated, contrary to the police agency’s constitution. ²

This was not an isolated case. Writing in 2017, Arzu Geybulla, an Azerbaijani journalist, described the practice as one of the ways the Azerbaijani government persecutes critics abroad. ³ In 2020, OC Media, an independent outlet covering the Caucasus region, said that Azerbaijani authorities had “applied for Interpol red notices for the arrest of seven political refugees living outside of the country.” ⁴

The press headlines have not stopped Interpol from cooperating closely with the country. In 2024, an officer from the Azerbaijani police participated in a training in the field of identification based on facial recognition. ⁵

The right to privacy and data protection is included in Article 35 of Azerbaijan’s 1995 constitution. The country became a member of the Council of Europe in January 2001, thus agreeing to respect the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as the authority of the European Court of Human Rights and its judgments. The country also signed and ratified, in 2009, the Council of Europe convention for the protection of individuals with regard to automatic processing of personal data. The convention was first opened for signature in 1981 and the world’s first legally binding international data protection instrument. ¹

In May 2010, Azerbaijan passed a national law on data protection that draws inspiration from the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). ² According to an Azerbaijani state presentation, this law intersects with others, including the law “on state secret”. Under the law, “state secret data is related with military, foreign policy, economic, intelligence, counterintelligence and operational-search activities.” The dissemination of this data “may damage the security of the Republic of Azerbaijan.” ³

In June 2018, a journalist born in Baku, Aytaj Soltan gizi Ahmadova (also known as Aytaj Tapdig), filed a case against Azerbaijan at the European Court of Human Rights. She complained that the authorities detained her without cause in 2015 and questioned her about her work as an investigative journalist for Meydan TV. Her reporting focused in particular on the corruption of the government and the ruling family. While she was detained, the police searched her flat without a warrant and seized her computer.

The journalist submitted to the court that:

…personal photographs and video-recordings stored on her computer, which had been unlawfully retained for more than a year, and which had not previously been shared anywhere had started to be published online, accompanied by insulting headlines and suggestions that she should be killed and hanged naked. ⁴

The Court concluded in a March 2025 judgement that Azerbaijan violated her right to privacy. However, despite repeated calls to act, including by the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe, ⁵ the court’s judgements on the rights of activists and government critics remain dead letters. Two months after the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, Tapdig was jailed along with eight other female journalists. ⁶