By Gayane Saribekian
YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Yet another former leader of Nagorno-Karabakh jailed in Azerbaijan has condemned his and the other Armenian prisoners’ trials and accused the Azerbaijani authorities of continuing to violate their rights.
“This is not a trial but an ethno-political vendetta against the past and future of the Armenian people,” Davit Babayan said in an audio message communicated to his family in Armenia by phone and made public on Thursday, May 14.
“All humanitarian, legal and international norms and their own legislation are being grossly violated,” he charged. “I call on fellow patriotic Armenians to unite and defend our rights because we are going to appeal to the international court.”
Eight former Karabakh Armenian leaders were captured right after the 2023 Azerbaijani offensive that restored Baku’s full control over Karabakh and forced the region’s Armenian population to flee to Armenia. They all denied a long list of war crimes charges leveled against them. An Azerbaijani military court sentenced five of them, including Babayan, to life imprisonment and gave the three others 20-year prison sentences in February this year at the end of two trials denounced by Amnesty International as a “travesty.”
Babayan said that his appeal against the verdict filed later in February “disappeared” and did not reach a higher Azerbaijani court. He suggested that the authorities in Baku are deliberately preventing him from appealing to an international tribunal, presumably the European Court of Human Rights.
