Luis Moreno Ocampo: “Azerbaijan’s bogus charges are a cover-up of the crimes committed against the Nagorno-Karabakh people including the prisoners. Their incarceration is a message to 120.000 Armenians not to return to their ancestral land in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev uses a Stalin tactic to show trials to eliminate his enemies. During the 1930´Stalin tortured, forced confessions, and executed his old Bolsheviks comrades, key generals, and secret police agents. The media was not able to expose that the trials were a cover-up to hide Stalin’s autocratic regime. In 1938, The New York Times ‘correspondent Harold Denny, considered that the trials were not fake.¹ Can we do it better?
Next January 17, two criminal trials will start in Baku against Aliyev victims. 15 Nagorno-Karabakh officials, including three former presidents and others against former State Minister Ruben Vardanyan. They have already been convicted.
Azerbaijan’s bogus charges are a cover-up of the crimes committed against the Nagorno-Karabakh people including the prisoners. Their incarceration is a message to 120.000 Armenians not to return to their ancestral land in Nagorno-Karabakh. All of them were starved since April 2023, and bombed in September, instilling conditions to destroy the ethnic group as such and produce serious mental harm, two material forms of committing genocide (Article 2 c and b of the Genocide Convention). The intention to destroy the group was affirmed by the Azerbaijan Parliament, which already considered that the entire Armenia should not exist, it should be West Azerbaijan.
If Aliyev has genocidal intentions, the Nagorno-Karabakh “ethnic cleansing” should be considered a genocide, if not it is a crime against humanity of persecution, forced displacement, and deportation.
There are also hundreds of Azeri dissidents incarcerated under Aliyev´s regime and they have no chance of a fair trial. On January 6, 2025, a criminal trial against a French national, Martin Ryan, started in Azerbaijan, exposing the tensions between both countries. Ryan is accused of collecting secret information about Azerbaijan’s military cooperation with Turkey and Pakistan and helping to recruit French-speaking Azerbaijanis to cooperate with French intelligence. Azeri prosecutors allege that he also facilitated contact between French intelligence and Azad Mammadli, an Azerbaijani citizen who is also on trial accused of high treason.²
The persecution against dissidents or French citizens could be characterized as a systemic attack against the civilian population, and consequently, as crimes against humanity.
Because the prosecution is a cover up the dictatorship could not offer fair trials, different decisions and documents by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the US State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, documented the lack of an independent judiciary in Azerbaijan. In 2021 Azerbaijani Judge Mehriban Suleymanova issued an unprecedented ruling unfavorable to a government-backed entity and she was fired.
The show trials should help to expose Aliyev’s dictatorship and shame his allies.
¹ https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1938/03/14/98110594.html?pageNumber=4
² https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/azerbaijan-starts-trial-frenchman-accused-spying-2025-01-06/