Case Explained: Europe rights court slams Azerbaijan for prosecuting a journalist to silence her – Legal Perspective

(CN) — A decadelong campaign against one of Azerbaijan’s most prominent investigative journalists reached a breaking point Tuesday, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled the state had turned ordinary criminal law into a tool for silencing a critic.

In its judgment, the Strasbourg-based court said the case against Khadija Ismayilova was never really about enforcing economic rules. Instead, the judges found, Azerbaijan used routine charges to punish her investigative reporting, wrapping political retaliation in the appearance of legality.

“The actual purpose of the criminal proceedings against the applicant was to silence and to punish her for her journalistic activities,” the court wrote.

That conclusion was years in the making.

Long before the case reached Strasbourg, Ismayilova knew the risks that came with reporting on Azerbaijan’s ruling elite. She had watched a fellow journalist gunned down for digging into the same circle of power, and she understood surveillance, threats and smear campaigns were part of the job.

What she did not expect was how personal the pressure would become — hidden cameras installed inside her own bedroom, an attempt to blackmail her into silence, and eventually criminal charges crafted to look routine.

There was no suggestion of treason or any claim that she posed a threat to national security. Instead, the case against her was built on paperwork: Claims of illegal business activity and tax violations.

Years later, Europe’s top human rights court said that choice was anything but accidental, framing Ismayilova’s prosecution as the culmination of a long-running conflict rather than an isolated criminal case.

Ismayilova had made her name reporting on how political power and private wealth intersected in Azerbaijan, producing investigations that traced business interests linked to the country’s ruling elite. Working with foreign outlets, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, she focused on ownership records, corporate structures and financial links drawn from public filings and company documents.

But that kind of scrutiny did not land in a neutral environment. By the time Ismayilova’s investigations began drawing international attention, Azerbaijan’s media space was already under heavy strain and independent journalists routinely faced surveillance, legal harassment and smear campaigns. Those pressures had already begun to shape Ismayilova’s own experience before prosecutors formally moved against her.

That escalation arrived in 2014, when authorities opened a criminal case after a former colleague at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty attempted suicide. Investigators accused Ismayilova of inciting the act.

The colleague survived, and the claim was never upheld as the basis for her conviction. But it set a larger criminal investigation in motion, one that soon pulled Ismayilova fully into the legal system.

What followed marked a clear shift from pressure to prosecution. Within months, the investigation moved toward a set of economic charges tied to Ismayilova’s work for foreign media outlets.

In 2015, authorities charged Ismayilova with illegal entrepreneurship, tax violations and abuse of power, arguing she had worked for foreign media outlets without proper state accreditation. She was convicted and sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison. Although Azerbaijan’s Supreme Court later reduced and suspended the sentence, the convictions stood, keeping her under legal constraints and a lasting public stain.

At first glance, the case appeared to turn on technical questions of economic regulation. The European court said that framing obscured what was really at stake.

Criminal prosecutions of journalists, the judges emphasized, demand heightened scrutiny because of their chilling effect on public debate. In Ismayilova’s case, that safeguard collapsed. Domestic courts largely accepted the government’s narrative and failed to engage with her core defense.

Ismayilova argued the charges against her had no clear basis in Azerbaijani law, because freelance journalism for foreign outlets did not amount to criminal business activity. She also challenged the idea that accreditation was a legal prerequisite for such work, noting domestic law did not attach criminal sanctions to its absence.

National judges nonetheless treated accreditation as mandatory and inferred criminal liability from that assumption, without addressing her objections. The human rights court found her conviction rested on elastic interpretations rather than precise legal rules.

That breakdown was not an isolated misstep, and the rights court placed Ismayilova’s prosecution within a broader pattern it had already identified in Azerbaijan. Given that, the judges said there was clear evidence that Ismayilova’s journalism set the case in motion, and the Azerbaijani government failed to show it did not.

The court found that Azerbaijan had violated multiple core protections under the European Convention on Human Rights and Ismayilova’s conviction breached her right to freedom of expression. In a rarer step, the judges also found that part of the case failed a basic rule of criminal law: The charges were not clearly defined by law in the first place.

For legal scholars, that combination made the ruling particularly striking.

Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou, a professor of human rights law at the University of Liverpool, said the court identified three fundamental flaws in the case: Criminal provisions stretched far beyond their normal meaning, domestic courts that failed to properly reason their decisions, and a prosecution aimed at silencing dissent rather than enforcing the law. Taken together, he said, it amounted to a “textbook example” of the misuse of criminal law against a journalist.

Whether that finding leads to concrete change on the ground is a separate question. Fariz Namazlı, the Azerbaijani lawyer who represented Ismayilova, said the ruling laid bare structural problems in how criminal law is used against critics. He cautioned, however, that the decision will mean little without follow-through given Azerbaijan’s record of delaying compensation payments and failing to reopen cases despite orders from Strasbourg.

Press freedom groups said the decision confirms what Ismayilova’s supporters have argued for years.

Miranda Patrucic, editor-in-chief of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, said the ruling recognizes that Ismayilova was targeted for “fearless reporting on corruption at the highest level,” with fabricated charges used to silence her.

Gulnoza Said, Europe and Central Asia program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, described Ismayilova as emblematic of Azerbaijan’s broader repression of independent media. She pointed to the country’s tally of jailed journalists and the many others forced into exile, calling Ismayilova one of the few who chose to stay and endure the consequences.

For legal advocates, the judgment marks a turning point.

Barbora Bukovská, senior director for law and policy at ARTICLE 19 — an international organization focused on freedom of expression and media rights — said the court went further than earlier cases involving Ismayilova by directly confronting the political nature of her conviction, not just the abuses surrounding her arrest and detention.

Media Defence, which supported Ismayilova’s legal fight, said the ruling strips away a familiar playbook: Using charges that look neutral on their face to deliver a punitive result.

Pádraig Hughes, the group’s legal director and Ismayilova’s lawyer before human rights court, said the judges had “unmasked Azerbaijan’s strategy of prosecuting critical journalists on trumped-up charges that are ostensibly unrelated to anything the journalist has published,” adding that the ruling recognized her trial as a sham designed to punish her reporting.

The Azerbaijani government did not respond to requests for comment.

Under the ruling, Azerbaijan must pay Ismayilova 12,000 euros (about $14,400) in nonpecuniary damages and 4,000 euros (about $4,800) euros in legal costs and expenses. The court dismissed her claim for pecuniary damages, noting related issues were already the subject of separate proceedings pending before the court.

Inside Azerbaijan, little has changed. Independent journalism remains dangerous, and compliance with judgments is uneven at best. The rights court did not erase Ismayilova’s conviction; it placed responsibility on the Azerbaijani authorities to remedy the violations, under the supervision of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers.

The judgment will become final unless either side seeks referral to the Grand Chamber within three months, a step granted only in exceptional cases. If no referral is requested, the court will monitor whether Azerbaijan complies with its obligations.

Courthouse News reporter Eunseo Hong is based in the Netherlands.