Azerbaijan: Twenty-Three Hostages, One Dictator, One Coward, and One Very Convenient Silence
WEST ASIA, 10 Aug 2026
Diran Noubar – TRANSCEND Media Service
10 Aug 2026 – The Baku Court of Appeal has, with admirable efficiency, confirmed the sentences handed down in February 2026 against the former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh. Life imprisonment for Arayik Harutyunyan, Levon Mnatsakanyan, Davit Ishkhanyan, and David Babayan. Twenty years for Ruben Vardanyan — the man who surrendered his Russian citizenship and his billionaire comfort to serve a people under siege, arrested on September 27, 2023 while trying to leave a territory that had been erased from the map in 24 hours. Twenty years each for former Artsakh presidents Arkadi Ghukasyan and Bako Sahakyan, men who spent their lives building institutions in a land the world spent thirty years pretending did not exist.
Surprising? Not remotely. In a country where the president inherited his throne from his KGB-general father, where constitutional amendments arrive like season passes — four of them, each conveniently extending Ilham Aliyev’s mandate, eliminating term limits, and creating a vice presidency assigned to his wife Mehriban — judicial independence is not merely absent. It is not even on the agenda.
Aliyev’s courts deliver what Aliyev’s palace requests. The defendants were always going to be convicted. The sentences were always going to be maximum. The appeal was always going to fail. Calling it a legal process is a courtesy the facts do not deserve.
These men governed a territory for decades. They organized its schools, its hospitals, its defense. They held genuine elections — the kind that do not feature 97% turnout for the incumbent. When Azerbaijan launched its 24-hour military offensive on September 19, 2023, they capitulated to spare their population further bloodshed. Their reward was arrest, a military tribunal in an enemy capital, and sentences that would embarrass a medieval court. Their crime, stripped of the legal theater, was this: they were Armenian, and they lost.
But let us not spend all our indignation on Baku. Aliyev is, at least, consistent. He has never pretended to be anything other than what he is.
The more interesting question — and the more uncomfortable one — concerns Nikol Pashinyan, Prime Minister of Armenia, architect of what his government calls a historic peace process and what the rest of us might call a systematic exercise in voluntary capitulation. Since 2021, Pashinyan has recognized Azerbaijani sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh, returned four Armenian villages to Azerbaijan in April 2024 (Baghanis Ayrim, Voskepar, Kirants, and Berkaber), and effectively erased the word “Artsakh” from official Armenian vocabulary. He has been rewarded with the warm approval of Brussels and Washington, who find a compliant South Caucasus government considerably more convenient than a troublesome one.
On the subject of the 23 Armenians imprisoned in Baku — former presidents, ministers, soldiers, and civilians — Pashinyan’s government has maintained what diplomats call calibrated restraint and what the rest of us call silence. When Azerbaijan released four prisoners in January 2026 as a “goodwill gesture,” Yerevan described it as progress. The other 23 remain in Umbaki high-security prison. Progress, as defined by those who have already conceded everything, apparently requires considerable patience.
What Pashinyan seems not to understand — or has decided to ignore — is that the Armenian nation does not begin and end at the borders of a small landlocked republic. It extends to Paris and Beirut and Los Angeles and São Paulo. It includes millions whose grandparents survived a genocide, who built communities across five continents, who have kept a culture and a language alive through sheer collective will. That diaspora is watching. It is not applauding.
The international community, for its part, has performed admirably in the one discipline it has truly mastered: the eloquent statement. The European Parliament expressed deep regret. Amnesty International condemned the verdict. Congressional delegations signed letters. The European Court of Human Rights ordered Azerbaijan to provide information on the detainees’ condition. Azerbaijan filed this request where it files all inconvenient international obligations: nowhere.
Twenty-three men sit in a Baku prison. Their families wait. Their lawyers prepare appeals to international courts that will take years to rule. In Yerevan, the peace process continues. In Brussels, the statements continue. In Baku, Aliyev continues — as he always has, as his father before him.
On October 9, 2026, a conference will convene in Yerevan — lawyers, human rights experts, political representatives, people who still believe that documentation and litigation are not futile. The date marks the third anniversary of the fall of Artsakh. The choice is deliberate.
Because grief, at some point, must become strategy. And silence — whether in Baku’s courtrooms or Yerevan’s corridors — must have a cost.
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Diran Noubar, an Italian-Armenian born in France, has lived in 11 countries until he moved to Armenia. He is a world-renowned, critically-acclaimed documentary filmmaker and war reporter. Starting in the early 2000’s in New York City, Diran produced and directed over 20 full-length documentary films. He is also a singer/songwriter and guitarist in his own band and runs a nonprofit charity organization, wearemenia.org.
Tags: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Justice, Politics, Russia
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 10 Aug 2026.
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