An Azerbaijani appeals court on August 6 upheld lengthy prison sentences against seven former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh captured by Baku in 2023.
Five of them were sentenced to life imprisonment and the two others received 20-year jail terms in February at the end of what Armenian lawyers and human rights activists see as a sham trial. A military court in Baku also handed slightly shorter prison sentences to eight other Karabakh Armenians tried together with them.
Ruben Vardanyan, an Armenian-born businessman who briefly served as Karabakh premier in late 2022 and early 2023, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in a separate trial two weeks later. Amnesty International denounced both trials as a “travesty.”
Vardanyan did not appeal against his sentence, unlike the seven other former Karabakh leaders. As one of them, Davit Ishkhanyan, explained in June, they did so merely to pave the way for their appeals to international courts.
“It is clear to all of us that the [appeals court] verdict has been made a long time ago and it is not the judicial panel that makes that verdict,” Ishkhanyan said in a fresh statement communicated to his family by phone and publicized ahead of the ruling’s announcement. “That body will only announce what has already been decided.”
The 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 deny a long list of war crimes charges levelled against them.
