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 Ishkhanian, 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,” Ishkhanian 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.
“We give worthy rebuffs to those arguments and false claims that concern the past, present and issues of honor of our people and that undermine our people’s national pride with false information, fabricated justifications,” said Ishkhanian.
Prospects for the release anytime soon of these and other Armenian prisoners remained uncertain even after the initialing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty in Washington last August. Neither the treaty nor a separate declaration signed by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian at the White House commits Baku to freeing them.
Pashinian and other Armenian officials insist that Yerevan has been doing its best to try to secure their release. Their critics dismiss these assurances.
Vardanyan has likewise accused the Armenian government of being indifferent to the prisoners’ fate. He has repeatedly lambasted Pashinian in statements from an Azerbaijani prison released through his family. Ishkhanian has gone farther, saying that Pashinian’s administration does not want Baku to free them.
