08/09/2026
🔴 EHRAC is deeply concerned by the news that our client, Anar Mammadli, has been sentenced to 13 years in prison by a court in 🇦🇿 Baku.
🔵 Anar’s conviction and imprisonment are without basis in law and in clear retaliation for his work as a defender and election monitor.
🔴 Our thoughts are with Anar and his family at this incredibly difficult time. We call for his immediate and unconditional release.
Anar is an Azerbaijani civil society activist and human rights defender, the Chairman and co-founder of the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Centre (EMDS). He has suffered serious harassment by the authorities for more than a decade. In 2014, after an extended period in pre-trial detention, he was sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment as part of a widespread crackdown on critical voices.
Anar was pardoned and released in 2016. In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that ‘the actual purpose (of Anar’s 2014 imprisonment) was to silence and punish the applicant as a civil society activist for his activities in the area of electoral monitoring’. The Court found a politically motivated violation of his Right to Liberty. Anar was awarded the 2014 Václav Havel Human Rights Prize of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe while in prison.
On 7 April 2024, EMDS published a critical report on the Azerbaijan presidential election. On 29 April, Anar was arrested on trumped-up charges – the same financial charges he has faced before and which the Azerbaijani Government has used to systematically target civil society activists, academics and journalists.
Anar’s arrest was unlawful and politically-motivated. The 27 months he has spent in pre-trial detention has had a significant impact on his health. At trial, no evidence was provided to support the charges brought against Anar. He was not permitted to challenge the prosecution’s accusations, in a clear violation of his right to a fair trial.
Anar’s experience is the latest indication of the state capture of Azerbaijan’s criminal justice system and its use as a tool of . His shockingly disproportionate sentence is further evidence of the Azerbaijani Government’s ongoing attempts to silence dissent.
It is estimated that there are more than 400 political prisoners currently in jail in Azerbaijan. That number has risen by over 300% since the start of the Government’s renewed crackdown in 2023.
EHRAC has previously raised Azerbaijan’s failure to quash Anar’s 2014 conviction with the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, the body that supervises the implementation of judgments from the European Court of Human Rights. We continue to call for further action to challenge the attempts to extinguish civil society and independent media in Azerbaijan.
We are working with our Azerbaijani partner lawyer, Emin Abbasov, to urgently challenge Anar’s unlawful imprisonment.
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Portrait of Anar Mammadli: Human Rights House Azerbaijan.
