Azerbaijan Hosts European Games Despite Criticism of the Country’s Human Rights Record
The first-ever European Games opened in Baku this week with an extravagant ceremony featuring a Lady Gaga performance and a flaming torch lit by President Ilham Aliyev — a spectacle human rights organizations say was designed to project a progressive, modern image for a government that has spent the past year jailing the journalists and activists most likely to complicate that narrative.
A New Games, an Old Government
More than 6,000 athletes from 50 countries converged on Baku’s Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremony, competing across 20 sports over two weeks, with some events serving as direct qualifiers for the following year’s Rio Olympics. Azerbaijani officials have framed the inaugural Games — intended to become a recurring European sporting event held every four years — as the biggest moment in the country’s history to showcase itself on a global stage, broadcast across 45 European countries and 98 nations beyond the continent.
That ambition has collided directly with Azerbaijan’s own recent record. Human Rights Watch has documented a sharpened crackdown on independent voices in the year leading up to the Games, one the organization has characterized as unprecedented in the post-Soviet era. Rasul Jafarov, founder of the Sport for Rights campaign that formed specifically to press Olympic organizers on Azerbaijan’s human rights record, was himself arrested ahead of the Games and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. Intigam Aliyev, the country’s most prominent human rights lawyer, received a seven-and-a-half-year sentence. Reporters Without Borders has ranked Azerbaijan 162nd out of 180 countries in its global press freedom index, singling it out as “Europe’s biggest prison for news providers.”
A Letter Smuggled From Prison
No case has drawn more international attention than that of Khadija Ismayilova, Azerbaijan’s best-known investigative journalist, arrested in December on charges critics widely view as retaliation for her reporting on alleged corruption involving President Aliyev’s family. On the eve of the opening ceremony, PEN released a letter Ismayilova had written from prison, smuggled out in pieces. “The truth is that Azerbaijan is in the midst of a human rights crisis. Things have never been worse,” the letter states. “As those at the top continue to profit from corruption, ordinary people are struggling to work, struggling to live, struggling for freedom.”
Ismayilova’s case is far from isolated. In a photo essay released months before the Games, Human Rights Watch highlighted a dozen individuals serving or facing long prison sentences the organization says reflect direct retaliation for criticizing government policy. Authorities also raided the Baku offices of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in December, seizing equipment and sealing the premises — one part of a broader pattern that has seen all foreign radio stations, including the BBC and Voice of America, barred from FM frequencies inside the country since 2009.
Press Freedom Tested at the Games Themselves
The government’s restrictions extended directly into coverage of the Games. Azerbaijani authorities denied or failed to process accreditation for at least three journalists from major European outlets in the weeks before the opening ceremony, including Radio France Internationale’s Régis Gente, a reporter who had covered the South Caucasus region since 2002. Authorities also blocked Amnesty International from releasing a planned human rights report inside Baku entirely.
Human Rights Watch’s Jane Buchanan argued the European Olympic Committees held real leverage to press for change and largely failed to use it: “As the first country to hold this new major European sporting event, Azerbaijan is looking to project a progressive, modern image internationally. If the European Games are to show that sport can leave a positive legacy, then every journalist and activist detained on politically motivated charges in Azerbaijan should be released well before the opening ceremony.” EOC officials pushed back on that framing directly, telling reporters the organization “cannot accept political engagements” and would not “dictate to a sovereign state what to do.”
Protests the Government Wouldn’t Allow at Home
Opposition to Azerbaijan’s human rights record played out in cities around the world on the day of the opening ceremony — but notably, not in Baku itself, where public demonstrations are heavily restricted and opposition groups announced no protest activity ahead of the ceremony. In Prague, activists staged a public demonstration dressed as police officers and athletes, drawing attention to the contrast between the polished international spectacle unfolding in Baku and the reality facing government critics inside the country.
For Human Rights Watch, that contrast was precisely the point the Games’ organizers seemed determined to obscure. As the group put it in its own assessment published as the opening ceremony began: rather than becoming a catalyst for genuine reform, as some in the international sporting community had hoped, the first European Games had instead become “another weapon in the Azerbaijani government’s effort to promote itself as a progressive, modern country” — all while the crackdown that made such a rebrand seem necessary in the first place continued largely uninterrupted.
For related coverage of press freedom and government crackdowns on dissent, see our piece on the bid to free FSRN contributor Khaled Sid Mohand from Syrian detention, or browse our full International archive.