Baku trial against Vardanyan was built on implausible charges, lawyer says

By Lia Avagyan

Azerbaijani authorities treated philanthropic projects linked to jailed Armenian businessman Ruben Vardanyan, including the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative and the financing of a mass wedding in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2008, as evidence of criminal activity, according to details of his verdict made public by his legal team.

Vardanyan’s family obtained the full written judgment in July, several months after a Baku military court sentenced him to 20 years in prison, human rights lawyer Siranush Sahakyan said on Friday. The document has now been published on the Free Armenian Prisoners website.

Sahakyan, who represents Vardanyan before the European Court of Human Rights, said his case has already been registered with the court. She described the Baku proceedings as a “farce” marked by multiple rights violations.

One example Sahakyan cited involved fighting on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border in November 2021. She said the consequences of that episode were attributed to Vardanyan even though he became Nagorno-Karabakh’s state minister only a year later, and had no military command role at the time.

According to Sahakyan, the court also treated some of Vardanyan’s charitable and social activities as criminal conduct. These included renovating schools and kindergartens and financing a large wedding in Nagorno-Karabakh. His role as godfather at the wedding was also cited, she said.

The verdict also referred to the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, which Vardanyan co-founded. Sahakyan said an award payment to an Iraqi laureate was characterized as financing Kurdish mercenaries. The laureate was Mirza Dinnayi, an Iraqi Yazidi activist who received the 2019 Aurora Prize for his work helping Yazidis and other victims of Islamic State violence. According to Aurora, Dinnayi directed the prize grant to organizations providing medical care, rehabilitation and other assistance to survivors. Sahakyan said the Azerbaijani court nevertheless treated the payment as evidence of financing Iraqi Kurdish mercenaries.

She said the judgment broadly treated the institutions of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic as an illegal armed or criminal organization. On that basis, holding office or maintaining other links with its institutions could be treated as participation in criminal activity.

The verdict also described Vardanyan’s appointment as state minister as a seizure of Azerbaijani state authority and treated his entry into Nagorno-Karabakh without Baku’s permission as an illegal border crossing.

Sahakyan said the defense still has not received the full judgment in the separate case against 15 other Armenians tried in Baku.

At least 19 Armenians, including former political and military leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, remain in Azerbaijani custody. Most were detained after Azerbaijan’s September 2023 offensive, which ended the region’s de facto Armenian administration and displaced its Armenian population.