All 16 defendants were captured by Azerbaijan during and after its September 2023 military offensive that forced Karabakh’s entire population to flee to Armenia and restored Azerbaijani control over the region. They include three former Karabakh presidents -- Arayik Harutiunian, Bako Sahakian and Arkadi Ghukasian -- as well as Ruben Vardanyan, an Armenian-born billionaire and philanthropist who briefly served as Karabakh premier in 2022-2023.
Azerbaijani government-controlled media released images of the defendants being taken from a prison to a military court in Baku in a convoy of police vehicles. The charges against them include genocide and war crimes, according to Azerbaijani prosecutors.
Vardanyan is understood to be tried separately from the other captives. The trials will take place behind closed doors, a fact decried by Siranush Sahakian, a human rights lawyer campaigning for the release of at least 23 Armenian prisoners still held in Azerbaijan.
“The transparency of the trials would allow us to more easily expose the fabricated nature of the accusations,” Sahakian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. Citing Baku’s notoriously poor human rights record, she said that that guilty verdicts in the cases are already a forgone conclusion.
Vardanyan also demanded public court hearings in a statement issued via his family in Armenia on Thursday. He said he is facing as many as 42 charges some of which carry life imprisonment. The tycoon, who had made his fortune in Russia, rejected them as politically motivated and accused Azerbaijani authorities of attributing false testimony to him.
In contrast with an outpouring of support for Vardanyan and the other captives voiced by prominent public figures in Armenia and its worldwide Diaspora, neither Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s office nor the Armenian Foreign Minister commented on the trials as of Friday evening. Lawmakers representing Pashinian’s Civil Contract party did not make any statements either.
Sahakian deplored the “inadmissible” silence of the Armenian authorities. She suggested that they are scared of angering the Azerbaijani leadership.
The Armenian government insisted earlier that it has been trying hard to have all Armenians remaining in Azerbaijani captivity freed. Armenian opposition groups and some Karabakh leaders exiled in Armenia dismissed those assurances.
Two of those leaders led on Friday a demonstration in Yerevan in support of the Karabakh Armenians standing trial in Baku. Its several hundred participants rallied outside the UN office in the Armenian capital before marching to the Foreign Ministry building to demand stronger international pressure on Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s regime.
“The pressure will increase if Armenia’s political authorities have the political will,” said Artak Beglarian, a former Karabakh premier and human rights ombudsman. “Because international structures and various governments are very straightforward in saying, ‘If this issue is not on Armenia's agenda, what do you want from us?’”
The current Karabakh ombudsman, Gegham Stepanian, also rebuked Pashinian’s government: “The Armenian authorities state that they constantly raise this issue in the negotiation process, but as I have said before, these efforts are not visible, to say the least.”