Image by Arzu Geybullayeva, created using Canva Pro.
Ulviyya Guliyeva, or Ulviyya Ali as she is known among her friends, is the 25th journalist to have been sent behind bars in Azerbaijan in a vicious assault on independent and opposition-aligned media that started in November 2023.
The journalist, who reported for Voice of America until February this year, and is known for her coverage of rights violations, freedom of expression, and social injustice stories, anticipated her arrest. She has shared a personal note with friends whom she instructed to publish in case something happened to her. “As all my colleagues [sent behind bars], I have committed no crime,” read the note that has now been shared across social media platforms by Guliyeva's friends and colleagues. The journalist is facing the same charges that have been leveled against all previously arrested journalists — smuggling foreign currency. The police claimed they found over EUR 6,000 in cash in her flat, which they had ransacked. Guliyeva has refuted the charges as bogus and vowed to continue her journalism from behind bars.
November 2023 until now
Since November 2023, the state has targeted several online media platforms, arresting reporters, hacking their social media accounts, removing their online content, and denying that the country silences freedom of expression, even as the country ranks 167th out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ most recent Press Freedom Index.
It started with Abzas Media. The investigative journalism platform had its entire Baku-based newsroom imprisoned on false charges of currency smuggling. This was followed by incidents involving Kanal 13 and, later, Toplum TV, an online news channel. Toplum TV’s office was stormed by the police, leading to the detention of staff, the confiscation of equipment, and the sealing of the building.
The arrests targeted not just journalists but cleared a broader space of civic and political activists, just in time, prior to hosting the COP29 summit last November.
In December 2024, just a month after COP29, Meydan TV, an online news outlet covering Azerbaijan, was targeted with arrests, with its entire newsroom sent behind bars on spurious currency smuggling charges.
Since then, several independent journalists who remained in the country have been arrested and placed under pre-trial investigation as part of the criminal inquiry opened against Meydan TV. Among them, Fatima Movlamli, Nurlan Gahraman and Shamshad Aghayev.
The same day Guliyeva faced arrest, another civic activist, Ahmad Mammadli, was also arrested. Mammadli was the chair of Democracy 1918, a now-defunct pro-democracy movement. Three months ago, he started a YouTube channel, Yoldash, where he shared stories focusing on labour and human rights issues in the country. Both were subjected to police violence. Guliyeva reportedly received several blows to her head, and Mammadli was severely beaten and electroshocked, all because they both refused to give up passwords to their devices.
“At that moment, the frail policeman standing over me started punching me in the head. Every time I said ‘I don’t know,’ he would punch me in the head. By that point, he punched me five times in the back of the head, twice in the middle. And twice he hit me on the temple with his finger,” wrote Guliyeva in a personal letter from pretrial detention facility about how she was detained, then arrested, the interrogation and the police violence she was subject to during interrogation. “Once they saw I was not going to give up the passwords, they started pulling my hair in different directions, pulling it out. The frail policeman said: ‘Bring me an electric shock.’ They brought something and put it on the table. When I didn’t give them the passwords, the frail policeman said, ‘I’ll violate your womanhood.’ My heart was in my mouth at these words. We have long seen and heard what the Azerbaijani police are ‘capable of.’ The Azerbaijani police abuse people, beat them, and commit illegal acts. Little did I know, the Azerbaijani police can abuse and rape a woman,” wrote Guliyeva.
In 2017, the Azerbaijani penitentiary service was granted over one million euros as part of a reform package designed and funded by the European Union and the Council of Europe. This is on top of 23 million euros provided since 2014 to finance development programs meant to generate “capacity building of the judicial system,” “training for staff,” “increased oversight of prison conditions,” and “action to improve transparency and prevent corruption,” among others according to reporting by Forbidden Stories and publicly available documents.
In February 2025, during the second local steering committee meeting of the EU and the Council of Europe's Partnership for Good Governance program, stakeholders, including Azerbaijan government representatives, reviewed the past year's achievements, discussed challenges and solutions, and planned activities for 2025. The Council of Europe announced that the initiative underscored the commitment of national authorities to cooperate and align domestic reforms with European standards. They reported that “four country-specific projects are implemented in Azerbaijan, with a total budget of 2.5 million euros, co-funded by the EU and the Council of Europe.” These projects aim “to promote mediation in justice, prevent and fight economic crime, promote equality, and prevent and combat violence against women and domestic violence.”
And yet, ill-treatment and torture in prisons in Azerbaijan are not uncommon. Instances of mistreatment have been repeatedly documented by local journalists as well as by the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), which issued a statement in July 2024, citing the outright refusal of the Azerbaijani authorities to cooperate with the CPT and the zero action taken by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan to end ill-treatment and even of torture by police officers. CPT also published a report in response to the lack of action.
According to “Article 11 of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the [country] report relating to a visit remains confidential until the authorities of the state concerned request its publication. There is no legal obligation for the state to publish the report.” CPT published the 2022 report two years later anyway in light of on-going torture and ill-treatment allegations.
On April 25, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas traveled to Baku and met with President Ilham Aliyev, Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeyhun Bayramov and a group of Young European Ambassadors from Azerbaijan. While they praised partnerships, there was no mention of the country’s track record on rights and freedoms — suggesting that Kallas has failed to use her position to advocate for universal human rights and international law.
The plight of Guliyeva and countless others in prison cells
After Voice of America’s license was revoked in Azerbaijan, Guliyeva said she would continue her journalism work even if she did not find employment. She kept her word and reported from trials she attended. “After other journalists were arrested, people subjected to injustice, violence, or repression would turn to me. I tried to be everyone’s voice. Even without a platform, I continued my work through my Facebook and X profiles. I was exposing the abuses faced by all political prisoners who had been falsely imprisoned,” wrote Guliyeva from prison, in the same letter describing how she was subjected to police violence. Reporting about these issues even after losing her job at Voice of America, she wrote, “undermined [the government's] narrative, that independent journalists and newsrooms were funded by Western stakeholders.”
Ulviyya Guliyeva is now the 11th journalist arrested as part of the Meydan TV investigation. In total, 25 journalists are behind bars, all facing spurious charges of smuggling and a list of other criminal offenses which journalists and the international human rights and press freedom community consider spurious and a vicious assault on independent and free media. On May 20, the prosecutor requested jail sentences ranging from 11 to 12 years for Abzas Media journalists, adding up to 80 years. On the same day, a young scholar and researcher of ethnic minorities, Igbal Abilov, who was arrested in July 2024, was sentenced to 18 years on treason charges. He was accused of making calls against the state based on orders from foreign actors, as well as inciting national, racial, social, or religious hatred and enmity.
