The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) recently announced that Azerbaijan ordered it to leave the country. The United States and the rest of the international community must not sit idly by.
The ICRC is the latest casualty in Azerbaijan’s purge of international non-governmental and media organizations that has sparked concern from human rights groups. Only weeks ago, Azerbaijan suspended the operations of the BBC and pulled the accreditation of correspondents from Voice of America and other international outlets. According to Azerbaijani media, the government has indicated that several United Nations agencies, including the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) are next on the chopping block.
The timing of the expulsions, particularly of the ICRC, is not happenstance. The ICRC has operated uninterrupted in Azerbaijan since 1992, providing much-needed humanitarian assistance in the country. The humanitarian organization’s recent work with political prisoners, however, has proved to be a thorn in Azerbaijan’s side.
Azerbaijan, long used to getting a relatively free pass on its human rights abuses, has found itself attracting unwanted media attention for its imprisonment and trial of 23 ethnic Armenians who have been charged with “terrorism,” “separatism,” and “war crimes.” Up until days ago, the ICRC had been the only lifeline for these political prisoners, whose sham trial began two months ago.
They were arrested in September 2023, as Azerbaijan was carrying out the mass expulsion of over 100,000 ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed enclave of Azerbaijan that until 2023 was inhabited and governed by its indigenous ethnic Armenian majority. Human rights experts and organizations have called this operation an ethnic cleansing and even a genocide.
Several of the prisoners are former high-ranking officials of Nagorno-Karabakh’s autonomous breakaway government, including three former presidents and an ex-state minister (effectively the prime minister), Ruben Vardanyan. Vardanyan is a philanthropist whose foundation is supported by Nobel laureates, former U.N. High Commissioner Mary Robinson, and actor George Clooney. Vardanyan began a hunger strike in February (now suspended) to protest his trial, which he describes as a “judicial farce.” Amnesty International has spoken out on his behalf, expressing concern about the ill-treatment and unfair legal proceedings he and other detainees have faced.
I have spent the past four years documenting the abuses that led to the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and its aftermath for the University Network for Human Rights. Our team from Harvard, Oxford, UCLA, Wesleyan, and Yale has conducted seven factfinding missions in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, documenting some of the worst atrocities I have seen anywhere. We published several reports and articles detailing brutal killings, disappearances, beheadings, and burning of churches and cemeteries by Azerbaijani forces, all carried out with the intention of eliminating ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh.
The ICRC played a major role in reducing atrocities against Armenian prisoners of war in Azerbaijani custody, our documentation indicated. Prisoners recounted to us that their torture—which included repeated beatings, starvation, and stabbings, all while being forced to chant, “Karabakh is Azerbaijan!”—subsided when ICRC representatives accessed the prisons and conducted visits. The humanitarian organization also deterred the killing or disappearance of those who were detained.
“When we saw the ICRC come, we could finally breathe because that meant that the world knew about us,” one victim told us. For those currently facing the rigged trial in Baku, the critical protections the ICRC provided no longer exist.
According to Freedom House, Azerbaijan is the seventh least-free country or territory in the world, and Nagorno-Karabakh, after Azerbaijan occupied it, became the least free place on Earth. Azerbaijan’s abysmal legal system is a central pillar of repression in the country. The situation is even more dire for ethnic Armenians, who Azerbaijan’s autocratic president Ilham Aliyev refers to as “rats,” “dogs,” and “barbarians” infected with a “virus.” If the ICRC is not permitted to operate in the country, the ethnic Armenians facing trial in Baku may spend the rest of their lives in prison, or worse.
This week, Azerbaijan and Armenia announced that they have nearly finalized a peace agreement that could end nearly four decades of conflict. Peace will be short-lived, however, if the leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh remains in prison.
Two weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, Donald Trump condemned the persecution and displacement of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and proclaimed, “I will protect persecuted Christians, I will work to stop the violence and ethnic cleansing, and we will restore PEACE between Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
With time running out for prisoners who are effectively hostages, President Trump should prove his words were more than an empty campaign promise by demanding without delay that Azerbaijan allow the ICRC to continue its operations in Azerbaijan and immediately release all political prisoners in the country.
Thomas Becker is the legal and policy director at the University Network for Human Rights. He has taught human rights at Harvard and Columbia Law Schools and Wesleyan University.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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