When world leaders arrive in Mr. Aliyev’s Azerbaijan for the United Nations’ COP 29 conference, we hope they do as little as possible to glorify their host — and appreciate the irony of climate talks being held there. Mr. Aliyev runs a kleptocratic money-laundering machine that rewards his elite with the country’s oil-and-gas riches. This is the third year in a row the COP event will be held in a dictatorship, after Egypt in 2022 and the United Arab Emirates in 2023.
Mr. Aliyev has repeatedly shuttered independent news media. On March 6, plainclothes police officers in Baku raided the editorial offices of an independent outlet, Toplum TV, seizing equipment and phones, and taking about 10 staffers to the Baku City Police Department for questioning, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and news reports. Most were later released, but at least two were charged with currency smuggling. According to the news website Caucasian Knot, the police claimed to have found thousands of euros in their apartments, but lawyers said the police planted the money, a tactic that Azeri authorities have used in the past.
On March 8, police grabbed Toplum TV’s founder, Alasgar Mammadli, and took him away in an unmarked vehicle as he left a clinic where he was being treated for cancer. They also detained employees of the Institute for Democratic Initiatives, located in the same offices as Toplum TV, and leaders of Platform for the Third Republic, a group advocating for a transition to democracy. They, too, were charged with smuggling.
Khadija Ismayilova, editor of Toplum TV, is one of Azerbaijan’s most respected investigative journalists. A former Baku bureau chief for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, she was arrested in 2014 and imprisoned for a year and a half on spurious charges of tax evasion and embezzlement after she exposed corruption in the Aliyev regime. She has insisted the outlet broke no laws.
Meanwhile, the Azeri authorities are continuing the cruel persecution of Gubad Ibadoghlu, a 52-year-old economist who has frequently questioned why Azerbaijan’s vast oil-and-gas resources have not been invested in making his country more prosperous and democratic. Mr. Ibadoghlu has close contacts with many in the United States; he was a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, and most recently a teacher at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was arrested July 23 in Baku and has been wrongfully held ever since on trumped-up charges involving cash that the police “found” in his office.
He has written to his family that “Conditions in the detention facilities are atrocious,” and his health problems are growing more serious, including diabetes and hypertension. He said the authorities have denied his requests for treatment by an independent doctor. He suffers from back pain, but they have refused him painkillers, his family told us. They also report he has been denied outdoor exercise. Mr. Ibadoghlu said he believes he is being held as an example to frighten Azeris who might challenge Mr. Aliyev.
The apparent trigger for his arrest was his role in starting a foundation in Britain aimed at preparing a new generation of Azerbaijani professionals, funded in part by cash recovered from corrupt Azerbaijani politicians. Mr. Ibadoghlu wrote in the letter that, if successful, the foundation would be a “serious blow to [the] kleptocratic regime in Azerbaijan, bringing new attention to [the] stolen money from [the] people and economy …” The foundation, registered four weeks before he was detained, must have infuriated Mr. Aliyev.
Now Mr. Aliyev is making Mr. Ibadoghlu pay a terrible price. “Urgent action is required to save my life in prison,” he says.
He should be released immediately, along with all the journalists and political prisoners. If not, global negotiators this November should call out Azerbaijan’s human rights abuses and not allow COP 29 to be a prestige-building moment for Azerbaijan’s dictator.
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