Azerbaijan

Governance in modern-day Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan’s substantial oil and gas resources drove rapid growth during the early 2000s, while the cooperation between West and Azerbaijan has flourished over the years. Despite its abundant energy resources, the government failed to translate the oil-derived wealth into better lives for its citizens.  The monopoly structure of the economy and corruption obstructed the possibility of building up a diversified and sustainable economic system in the country. Much of the country’s political and economic systems operate on a pyramidal web of often institutionalized corruption where regional and clan influences remain strong. The president and his family sit at the top of this pyramid.

The Aliyev family’s dominance in Azerbaijan’s political and social life spans over three decades. The late Heydar Aliyev, an ex-Soviet security service general, held power between 1993 and 2003. He was followed by his son, Ilham Aliyev, who has maintained the presidential position since 2003. In 2017, President Aliyev appointed his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, as the First Vice President.

Aliyev’s government has consistently employed tactics of repression against political dissent, freedom of expression, and civil liberties, drawing severe criticism from international human rights organizations. All the elections held under the Aliyev family’s rule since 1993 have been marred by fraud and irregularities.  Each round of the flawed elections had been a lost opportunity for Azerbaijan to step away from post-Soviet autocracy towards democracy. President Aliyev was reelected to another seven-year term in a snap poll in February 2024 that was widely deemed not free and fair by credible election monitors.

While Azerbaijan has a longstanding and well-documented record of repressing critical voices, over the last several years, the authorities have accelerated their crackdown and have done their utmost to destroy civil society organizations, shut down independent media, maintain tight control over all aspects of public life, eliminate political opposition, and create a culture of fear and intimidation. The Azerbaijani government’s use of criminal prosecution as a tool for political retaliation against its critics is a well-documented problem. Some of the nearly 300 political prisoners behind bars now are influential figures of the country’s dismantled civil society, which includes rights activists, political opposition figures, journalists, religious figures, and other perceived government critics and many others who have faced prosecution for the legitimate exercise of civil and political rights. Torture and ill-treatment remain widespread and many of the detainees have complained of ill-treatment in police custody. Azerbaijan has also long been a target for its treatment of LGBTQ+ community, who often face discrimination and violence, and there is little recourse through the police or any official judicial channels.

History before its independence in 1991

In the 11^th century, the conquering Seljuk Turks laid the ethnic foundation of contemporary Azerbaijan following the waning of the Arab Caliphate and several semi-independent states in the region. In the 13^th and 14^th centuries, the country sustained Mongol-Tatar invasions. In the Middle Ages, it became part of the Turkic-speaking Safavid Dynasty. It consisted of various independent khanates in the mid-18th and early 19th centuries.

The Turkmenchay Peace Treaty of 1828 divided Azerbaijanis between two empires, Czarist Russia and Gajar Iran, following the Russian-Persian Wars of 1804-1813 and 1826-1828. The territory of present-day independent Azerbaijan became part of the Russian empire, while southern Azerbaijan remained—and continues to be—part of Iran. At least 20 million Azerbaijanis are estimated to live in Iran, which is almost twice the population of independent Azerbaijan.

An Azerbaijani national identity emerged at the end of the 19th century. In 1873, oil was discovered in Baku city, which, by the beginning of the twentieth century, supplied almost half of the oil used in the world. After almost 80 years of being part of the Russian Empire in the Caucasus, the first Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) was established in May 1918. Azerbaijan became one of the earliest democratic and secular republics in the Muslim world. However, it lasted only two years: Azerbaijan was invaded by Bolsheviks in April 1920, which led to the establishment of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.

In 1990, Azerbaijan began to push for independence from the USSR in massive demonstrations in Baku that were brutally suppressed, and many civilians killed by Soviet military intervention on 20 January, in what Azerbaijanis refer to as “Black January”. Azerbaijan remained under Soviet rule until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, after which the independent Republic of Azerbaijan was proclaimed.

War with Armenia and end of the armed separatism in Nagorno-Karabakh

In the final years of the Soviet era, an ethnic-Armenian separatist movement sought to unify with Armenia and to end Azerbaijani control over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic-Armenian majority enclave in Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional legislature passed a resolution in 1988 declaring its intention to join the Republic of Armenia despite its official location within Azerbaijan. Amid Soviet dissolution in 1991, just as Armenia and Azerbaijan achieved statehood, Nagorno-Karabakh officially declared independence and full-scale war erupted.

The conflict over Nagorno Karabakh in the early 1990s turned into a full-scale war between the newly independent Azerbaijan and Armenia. The first Karabakh war ended with a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994. It resulted in the establishment of the de facto independent Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan. Around 600.000 Azerbaijanis became internally displaced persons (IDP) in Azerbaijan after the occupation. De-facto Nagorno-Karabakh state, which has never been recognized by any UN member state or by multilateral organizations, took control of Nagorno Karabakh and seven Azerbaijani districts around it, creating a security buffer zone and a land connection to Armenia. While the international mediating mechanisms proved ineffective, the OSCE Minsk Group, which was the international facilitator in the conflict resolution, did not change but rather hardened the status quo between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Following the second Karabakh War in 2020 Autumn and its dramatic end in September 2023, Azerbaijan restored its territorial integrity and ended three decades of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. More than 100,000 ethnic Armenians—nearly the entire Armenian population of the area—fled to Armenia.

Despite their bloody history and clashes, a long-term peace negotiation between Armenia and Azerbaijan is currently underway in a bid to end decades of hostilities.

NHC and Azerbaijan

The NHC started monitoring the human rights situation in Azerbaijan in 2001 when the country became a member of the Council of Europe (CoE). Since then, we have built a deep knowledge of the human rights situation in the country and a vast network of human rights defenders, journalists, and politically active persons. We have supported various projects to empower civil society and increase its effectiveness in monitoring and preventing human rights violations in the country.

NHC’s dozens of trainings helped to capacitate and equip large numbers of Azerbaijani NGOs and human rights defenders to monitor instances of human rights abuses, provide legal aid to victims, and use advocacy and strategic litigation to challenge government practices of violating fundamental rights. The NHC’s support for investigative journalists was key to increasing the quality coverage of Azerbaijan’s social, political and human rights concerns.

Through amplifying the voices of HRDs and increasing the impact of their activities through networking and bridge-building for joint advocacy at national and international levels, NHC’s engagements strengthened the voice of Azerbaijan’s civil society to call upon governments and international organizations to support fundamental rights to strengthen civic space and urge the government to release political prisoners.

Timeline

• 7th – 10th century: Azerbaijan under the Arab Caliphate1200-1800: Azerbaijan as part of various Turkic dynasties
• 1828: Azerbaijan divided between Czarist Russia and Gajar Iran
• 1918: Azerbaijan Democratic Republic announced
• 1920: Became part of the USSR
• 1988: Conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh
• 1991: Independence from the Soviet Union
• 1994: Ceasefire between Azerbaijan and Armenia
• 2001: Azerbaijan joins the Council of Europe
• 2003: Heydar Aliyev died, and his son Ilham Aliyev took over as president
• 2020: War with Armenia and liberation of occupied territories
• 2024: Azerbaijan’s accreditation at PACE was suspended due to human rights concerns