Ulvi Hasanli, director of anti-corruption investigative outlet Abzas Media, has been detained since November 2023. In June 2025 he was sentenced to nine years in prison on multiple financial crime charges in connection with his alleged receipt of Western donor funding.
Hasanli is one of at least 25 journalists and media workers jailed between late 2023 and August 2025 in a major crackdown on the independent press and civil society in Azerbaijan.
A former activist who co-founded Abzas Media in 2016, Hasanli was on a 2021 leaked list of individuals potentially targeted with Pegasus spyware produced by the Israeli company NSO Group, according to the global investigative network Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Police in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, detained Hasanli outside his apartment at around 4:30 a.m. on November 20, 2023, as he was on his way to take an international flight. In a voice recording published by Abzas Media, Hasanli said he entered a taxi outside his home when a vehicle blocked the taxi’s path and masked men came out and grabbed him from the vehicle, punching him in the eye. The men took him to Baku City Police Department, where officers punched and kicked him and asked why Abzas Media writes about corruption, he said.
Later the same day, police searched Abzas Media’s editorial office, where they claimed to find 40,000 euros (US$43,770). Police also arrested Abzas Media consultant Mahammad Kekalov and, early the following morning, the outlet’s chief editor Sevinj Vagifgizi. A court ordered the three to be held in pretrial detention for four months on charges of conspiring to bring a large sum of money into the country unlawfully. Police subsequently also arrested Abzas Media journalists Nargiz Absalamova, Hafiz Babali, and Elnara Gasimova on the same charges.
On November 28, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the U.S., German, and French envoys and accused their embassies and organizations registered in those countries of illegally funding Abzas Media. Reports in Azerbaijani state and pro-government media used materials that apparently had been leaked from authorities’ investigation into Abzas Media to accuse the outlet’s staff of illegally bringing undeclared grants from foreign donor organizations into the country.
Hasanli and his colleagues denied the charges. A statement issued by Abzas Media said the charges were retaliation by Aliyev for “a series of investigations into the corruption crimes committed by the president of the country and his appointed officials.”
In the months prior to the arrests, Abzas Media published a series of investigations into the wealth of public figures such as the son-in-law and other family members of Aliyev, the head of Azerbaijan’s state security service, and the country’s foreign minister.
Abzas Media is one of three major outlets – including Toplum TV and Meydan TV – from among Azerbaijan’s last remaining independent media targeted over alleged receipt of Western donor money since late 2023. The crackdown has been linked to a decline in Azerbaijani-Western relations and a surge in Azerbaijani authoritarianism following the country’s military recapture of the Nagorno-Karabakh region in September 2023.
Azerbaijani law requires civil society groups to obtain state approval for foreign grants, which authorities accuse Abzas Media and other outlets of failing to do.
In rulings on similar cases, the European Court of Human Rights stressed that such an omission was punishable under Azerbaijani law by fines, not criminal sanctions. Independent experts say that authorities refuse to register independent organizations seeking foreign grants, making it impossible to legally receive them. [NL: replacing this paragraph with one from today’s alert]
Azerbaijani Minister of Internal Affairs Vilayat Eyvazov told CPJ by email on November 30, 2023, that any claims that charges against the outlet’s staff were related to their work were “completely groundless.”
In August 2024 authorities brought seven new economic crime charges against the Abzas journalists, including money laundering and tax evasion, increasing the maximum prison sentence to 12 years.
In early October, 2024, Hasanli’s wife, Rubaba Guliyeva, accused prison authorities of “systematic inhuman treatment” of Hasanli after he reported on the ill-treatment of other detainees in jail. Guliyeva said that Hasanli had been subject to orchestrated threats from fellow detainees, shoved against a wall and struck by a prison guard, and was allowed to see his family only from behind a glass screen. Hasanli has complained of “unbearable conditions” in jail.
On June 20, 2025, a court sentenced Hasanli to nine years in prison and his colleagues were handed between 7.5 and nine years sentences. As the verdicts were read, Abzas Media journalists turned their backs on the judges and held up posters of the outlet’s corruption investigations into senior officials, including the president’s family.
In July and August, Hasanli undertook two hunger strikes in protest against his transfer to the Umbaki Penitentiary Complex, around 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Baku, arguing that he should remain at the pretrial detention center pending his appeal. He accused authorities of deliberately making it difficult for his family and lawyers to visit him in retaliation for reporting on the jail’s conditions. The journalist’s wife said Hasanli lost 15 kilograms (33 pounds) and developed kidney cysts and low blood pressure, and that prison authorities threatened him and placed him in a punishment cell to pressure him to stop the hunger strikes.
On September 9, a Baku court upheld the sentences against Hasanli and the other journalists jailed in the Abzas Media case.
CPJ emailed the office of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and the Penitentiary Service for comment in September 2025 but did not receive any replies.