By Lia Avagyan
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled against Azerbaijan in the first case to emerge from the April 2016 war, finding that Azerbaijani forces tortured and beheaded an Armenian officer and ordering Baku to pay 90,000 euros (about $103,000) to his family.
The Strasbourg court issued the judgment on June 18, almost exactly 10 years after the four-day war along the Nagorno-Karabakh line of contact. The case concerns Major Hayk Toroyan, the 30-year-old head of the rocket-artillery armament service in Mataghis, a village in northern Nagorno-Karabakh. Toroyan and a fellow serviceman were carrying ammunition to the command post in nearby Talish when they came under Azerbaijani fire.
The court found that Azerbaijan violated the right to life and the prohibition of torture, citing the beheading and mutilation of the officer's body. The judges also ordered Baku to investigate the killing and to hold accountable both those who carried out the abuse and those who ordered it. Toroyan's relatives were recognized as victims of torture as well, for the suffering caused by his death and by burying him without all of his remains.
"We were able to prove that the Azerbaijani servicemen first beheaded Hrant Gharibyan, then cut off Hayk Toroyan's hands and beheaded him alive," said human rights lawyer Siranush Sahakyan, a member of the applicants' legal team, in remarks to RFE/RL's Armenian Service. She said the killer circulated photographs of the severed head, posed for a selfie with Ramil Safarov — the Azerbaijani officer who axe-murdered a sleeping Armenian counterpart at a NATO training course in Budapest in 2004 — and never returned the head, while the act was celebrated in Azerbaijan.
Baku argued throughout the proceedings that it had no link to the killing, suggesting the Armenian side could have staged it. The court rejected that. Azerbaijan's objections were unsuccessful, Sahakyan said, and the judges found Azerbaijani forces responsible.
Sahakyan said Azerbaijan was likely to resist the ruling for as long as possible but would pay a political price. Baku will face political pressure and a drop in the ruling power's standing, she said.
The judgment is the first of more than 20 expected rulings tied to the 2016 war, all concerning the torture of Armenian servicemen. Sahakyan said 23 such cases had been documented and submitted to the court, including three beheadings, the Khalafyan case — the killing of elderly residents combined with the severing of an ear — and cases of bodily mutilation.
An earlier ruling might have helped prevent the widespread beheadings documented in the 2020 44-day war, Sahakyan argued, though she said the delayed judgment could still advance accountability and curb impunity. She also warned against dropping Armenia's interstate complaints against Azerbaijan, a step she said is referenced in the initialed Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement. The peace process must be built on guaranteeing justice to Armenian victims, she said.
Liparit Drmeyan, who headed Armenia's Office of the Representative on International Legal Matters until 2025, called the judgment an important precedent for protecting the rights of victims of the 2020 war whose complaints are pending. Writing on Facebook, he said Armenia took part in the case as a third party and that, despite Baku's repeated denials, the applicants assembled irrefutable evidence — including footage from Azerbaijani media in which special forces presented the killing as a heroic act.
Toroyan was posthumously awarded the Combat Cross, first degree.
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