'All within law': How president of Azerbaijan destroyed or subjugated media
Repressions against independent media in Azerbaijan
The blog by JAMnews editor Sofo Bukia was originally published on the media watchdog platform Mediachecker.
A three-year-old girl in a pink nightgown clings to her father’s legs, crying and trying to stop the masked police officers who are escorting him out of the apartment. The father says goodbye to his daughter and follows the officers in uniform.
This dramatic episode took place in November 2023 at the home of journalist Aziz Orujov in Baku. His arrest marked the beginning of a new wave of repression against journalists in Azerbaijan.
Today, Aziz Orujov is in prison on fabricated charges, and his little daughter is growing up without her father.
Azerbaijan has never been a country where journalists felt comfortable, but the repression against independent media and civil society that began in November 2023 has been unprecedented, even by local standards.
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Since then, over 100 journalists, civil society representatives, human rights defenders, and public and political activists have been arrested on various charges.
📌 In February 2025, human rights defenders counted 357 political prisoners in Azerbaijan.
This is a record high in the last 25 years. The number of journalist political prisoners has particularly increased.
Most of the detained journalists have been charged under Article 206.3.2 of the Azerbaijani Criminal Code — smuggling currency committed by an organized group. The regime claims that these journalists illegally brought financial funds from donor organizations into Azerbaijan..
“The “media purge” was so extensive that today there is almost no critical media (!) left in the country, nor any (!) independent journalists.”
📌 На данный момент азербайджанские журналисты находятся либо в изгнании, либо в тюрьмах, либо помещены под домашний арест.
Those who managed to escape repression and remain in the country have either left the profession or become loyal to the regime.
For example, a journalist I know with 25 years of experience, who was for many years the editor of an international publication, has been working as a preschool teacher since March. His colleague, also an experienced editor, has turned to real estate.
“It used to be possible to work. There was, so to speak, ‘space for maneuver.’ But now that’s out of the question. They [the authorities] have closed all the avenues. You either have to flee the country or stop being a journalist. But I can’t leave, I have elderly parents,” he explained to me.
How did Aliyev manage to do this?
The “foreign agent” law, Azerbaijani style.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev didn’t reinvent the wheel and did what all authoritarian leaders unwilling to relinquish power do: he passed repressive laws, the Azerbaijani equivalents of the notorious “foreign agents” law.
The turning point came in 2014, when amendments were made to the laws on NGOs and grants in Azerbaijan, severely limiting the possibility of receiving foreign funding.
The state required NGOs to register all grants they received with the Ministry of Justice, simultaneously granting itself the right to refuse registration.
As a result, more than 50 international organizations left Azerbaijan.
However, the culmination came with the law “on Media”, signed by Ilham Aliyev in February 2022, which directly impacted journalists.
The new law prohibited journalists from accepting any foreign money, whether grants, fees, or salaries, and also required them to register in the Unified State Register, providing the government with an extensive list of personal data.
The law also regulates who can work as a journalist, setting strict criteria for access to the profession. For example, only Azerbaijani citizens (with no foreign involvement) can own a media outlet. A person registered as a journalist must have a higher education, an employment contract, and no criminal record. In other words, freelancers (many of whom in Azerbaijan worked primarily with international media) were automatically declared illegal.
Moreover, according to the new law, the state can revoke the license of any media outlet for so-called “biased coverage” of events in the country. This provision effectively legalized censorship.
As expected, this law became a powerful tool of repression in the hands of Aliyev’s government.
A new era began in Azerbaijan — the physical destruction of independent media through economic suppression, police raids, and judicial bans.
Repression: arrests and persecutions
📌 In 2024, Azerbaijan entered the top ten countries with the highest number of imprisoned journalists.
In recent years, journalists are increasingly detained not for “defamation” as before, but on fabricated economic and criminal charges such as “smuggling,” “tax evasion,” and “illegal currency possession.”
As a result, by the beginning of 2025, several dozen journalists found themselves in pretrial detention on charges of “currency smuggling.”
These charges were not brought against individuals alone, but entire editorial teams were arrested.
The first such mass arrest took place in November 2023, when the police conducted a search at the office of the independent publication Abzas Media, where they “discovered” a large sum of cash in euros.
The heads of the publication, Ulvi Hasanly and Sevinc Vagifgizi, were arrested. Colleagues of the detained journalists are convinced that the police planted the money in the office. Soon after, other staff members of the publication were also arrested on the same charges of smuggling. Many of them face prison sentences of 8 to 12 years.
To clarify: simply receiving fees from an international fund for work done can already be considered a violation of the law.
According to independent Azerbaijani experts, the arrest of journalists from critical but relatively small online outlets was a show of force aimed at intimidating journalists in general:
“They are persecuted not so much for what they said in their articles, but to send a message to others. In this sense, the more harmless and innocent the victim, the greater the psychological effect,” said human rights activist Eldar Zeynalov.
An international investigation also revealed that the Azerbaijani authorities had been spying on journalists using the Pegasus spyware, which had been installed on their phones.
Another detail: in 2014, when investigative journalist from the Azerbaijani bureau of Radio Free Europe, Khadija Ismayilova, was arrested, the imprisonment of a female journalist seemed unimaginable. Today, Azerbaijani prisons are filled with female journalists and activists.
Exiled journalists
Many Azerbaijani journalists were forced to leave the country to avoid arrest. However, even in exile, they do not feel safe — intelligence agencies continue to monitor them, and their family members who remain in Azerbaijan face pressure.
Azerbaijani journalists in exile have founded several online media platforms and continued their work with the help of freelance journalists within the country.
One such platform is Meydan TV, founded by investigative journalists who had emigrated to Germany.
The publication had a large network of freelance contributors in Azerbaijan: they typically wrote anonymously but worked actively and spent years preparing critical reports and investigations.
However, Meydan TV can no longer operate in Azerbaijan — by the end of 2024, nine of its reporters were arrested, after which the publication decided to cease collaborating with local journalists for their safety.
The same fate befell other international media outlets — while Azerbaijani journalists had previously taken risks but continued collaborating with them, by 2025 this became impossible.
International reaction: concerned silence
On the one hand, the international community constantly expresses concern over what is happening in Azerbaijan. On the other hand, as critics note, it does not act decisively enough and maintains diplomatic silence, as it is primarily interested in Azerbaijan’s natural resources.
The most recent example: in late 2024, Azerbaijan hosted a major international forum, the UN Climate Conference (COP29). The foreign guests who gathered for the forum were not disturbed by the fact that several hundred political prisoners were held in the country’s prisons.
This is why it is often said in Azerbaijan that the country’s main problem is oil, and that Aliyev’s government relies on it and other natural resources.
Observers also note that the situation in the country has become increasingly complicated after each new presidential election. More specifically — after each new “reelection” of Ilham Aliyev. It has become an unwritten rule that every time after the “elections,” the repression intensifies.
Additionally, experts say Aliyev chose a timely moment for a global purge: the United States was occupied with its election campaign, and Europe was focused on the war in Ukraine.
Today, in a world of complete uncertainty, Aliyev follows his chosen course even more boldly, as no one is capable of stopping him.
What is happening now?
Ilham Aliyev, who has been ruling the country without interruption since 2003, continues to strengthen the vertical of power.
The results of a decade-long fight against independent media are already evident and are having a significant impact on the citizens of Azerbaijan.
The country has established an information monopoly – most of its residents get their news only from pro-government television channels, where Azerbaijan is presented as a prosperous country without any problems.
Official propaganda dominates the media – daily reports are broadcast about the reclaimed lands of Karabakh, grand infrastructure projects, and the Aliyev family.
Corruption scandals and instances of abuse of power are not covered. The opposition is either ignored or labeled as “enemies of the state.”
Any protest, whether social or environmental, is either completely ignored or intentionally portrayed as a marginal event.
Without independent journalism, corruption and bureaucratic abuse have taken even deeper root. No one is left to investigate the offshore schemes of the Aliyev family and their inner circle, land frauds, police abuse, torture in prisons, and embezzlement of state funds.
In the absence of public oversight, government officials are confident that critical words directed at them will not be published in online media or broadcast on television.
High-profile international corruption investigations that directly involve the Baku government are never discussed within the country, as the media remains silent on the matter.
The connection between the government and the people has virtually been severed. Without independent media, citizens no longer have the opportunity to publicly discuss their problems.
“This deprives not only independent journalists of their rights but the entire society,” says one journalist.
Another serious consequence of this process is the so-called “brain drain” – journalists, analysts, and civil activists are forced to emigrate because they have no prospects for development within the country.
The government’s fight against the media and civil society has been blatantly unequal. The opposition is weakened and fragmented, civil society has been destroyed. The country is silent, interrupted only by official government statements.
