An Azerbaijani military court sentenced one of them, businessman Ruben Vardanyan, to 20 years in prison on Tuesday at the end of a yearlong trial. Seven other former Karabakh leaders stood a separate trial that ended on February 5. Five of them were sentenced to life imprisonment while the two others received 20-year jail sentences. The court handed slightly shorter prison sentences to eight other Karabakh Armenians tried together with them.
“The conviction of the 16 defendants, culminating in this sentence against Ruben Vardanyan, is nothing short of a travesty,” Marie Struthers, Amnesty International’s director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement issued by the Western human rights group late on Tuesday. “The fact that Ruben Vardanyan and the others, several civilians like himself, were tried before a military court in itself raises serious concerns and is incompatible with fair trial guarantees.”
“Accused of a plethora of extremely serious crimes, Ruben Vardanyan and other defendants were tried in an effectively closed hearing, based on ‘evidence’ in a language they could not understand and that was not adequately translated,” she said. “Even the charges – over 40 against Vardanyan alone – including ‘terrorism’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ were not fully publicly disclosed during proceedings.”
“Amnesty International requested information from the Azerbaijani authorities about the trial and the evidence but received no response,” added Struthers.
The defendants were arrested right after Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive that restored Azerbaijani control over Karabakh and forced the region’s practically entire population to flee to Armenia. The former Karabakh leaders denied the accusations throughout their trials.
Vardanyan’s family condemned the 20-year jail sentence against the tycoon as a “judgment against the Armenian people as a whole.”
“A respected businessman and philanthropist, Ruben’s only ‘crime’ was standing up for the right to self-determination of the Armenian-Christian people of Nagorno-Karabakh,” his American lawyer, Jared Genser, said in a separate statement.
The Armenian government has still not officially commented on the jail terms given to the former Karabakh leaders, stoking opposition allegations about its complicity in the continuing captivity of these and 11 other Armenians held in Azerbaijan. The government had waited for weeks before criticizing the “mock trials” last year.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian claimed in January 2025 that an explicit condemnation would only harm the defendants. His critics insisted that he is simply afraid of angering Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
Aliyev rejected at the weekend calls for the release of the former Karabakh leaders, comparing them to Nazi Germany’s leaders. He said that their trials were “absolutely transparent.”