Farid Mehralizada, an economist and journalist for the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was ready to be a father. His wife, Nargiz, was five months pregnant when he dropped her off near a Metro stop in Baku, Azerbaijan, one May morning in 2024.
As he parked, several men in plain clothes approached Mehralizada, put a bag over his head and forced him into their car, Deniz Yuksel, advocacy manager at RFE/RL, told the Capital News Service in an interview. They drove him to the main police station in Baku, the capital of the nation. Hours later, he was returned home in handcuffs as police conducted a search, seizing the couple’s car, cellphones and computers.
Two days later, Mehralizada was placed in pre-trial detention and was charged with conspiring to smuggle foreign currency, Yuksel said. In August 2024, new charges were added, including “illegal entrepreneurship, document forgery, tax evasion.”
Mehralizada’s daughter was born while he was in detention, Yuksel said.
Mehralizada was accused of committing the crimes on behalf of Abzas Media, an independent investigative outlet whose director, editor-in-chief and four other media employees were charged with similar offenses around the same time. However, Mehralizada has said he never worked for the outlet but was occasionally quoted in articles by journalists there.
During Mehralizada’s trial, the courts never established that Mehralizada worked for Abzas Media, according to Yuksel.
In 2014, Azerbaijan, a U.S. ally, shut down the RFE/RL office in Baku. A few journalists remain on contract with the outlet, which vowed to continue reporting from the authoritarian country. RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service, known locally as Radio Azadliq, still operates on digital and satellite platforms where Mehralizada works.
“I think my arrest highlighted how authoritarian governments, like Azerbaijan’s, fear the power of numbers and the reality they reveal through statistics,” the U.S.-funded Voice of America reported in December 2024, quoting from a message Mehralizada gave his wife to pass on.
Among the journalist’s criticisms was that the government had not diversified the economy’s reliance on oil and gas, Gunel Safarova, acting editor-in-chief of Abzas Media, said in an interview with CNS.
Many of the journalists who were not charged fled the country and continue to report from exile, according to Arzu Geybulla, an exiled Azeri journalist and Human Rights Watch researcher.
The foreign smuggling charges were based on allegations that the media organization did not have state approval to receive money from foreign groups, according to Nicholas Lewis, the Central Asia and Caucasus correspondent from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In June 2025, a court sentenced Mehralizada to nine years in prison. He and the six Abzas Media employees appealed the decision, which was upheld in September, according to RFE/RL.
The same currency smuggling charges have been used against 25 other journalists, said Kelly Bloss, the Caucasus editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in an email response to the CNS.
The Embassy of Azerbaijan disputed the accusations in this article.
“Azerbaijan has a long-standing and vibrant tradition of journalism, demonstrated by the participants of hundreds of local and international media representatives at major events such as COP29 and other international conferences,” the embassy said in an email response to CNS. “
“It is essential to underline that journalism has no connection to illegal activity,” it said. “If an individual engages in unlawful conduct, including illicit financial operations, they are accountable under Azerbaijan law. Efforts to politicize such matters undermine both the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary.”
In a March 19 column, Mehralizada wrote for the National Interest, a conservative U.S. online magazine, he said: “My reporting upset the Azerbaijani government, which views everything in black and white. If you’re not a supporter, then you are a traitor.”
Azerbaijan is an oil- and gas-rich country in the South Caucasus region that borders Iran, Russia and Turkey. Once a part of the Soviet Union, it gained independence in 1991 as the USSR collapsed.
President Ilham Aliyev assumed power in 2003, succeeding his father, Heydar Aliyev. The nation is majority Shia Muslim but the state is secular.
Azerbaijan and the United States have long been allies, even though the State Department’s human rights office has criticized its human rights record, corruption and lack of free speech and press.
Azerbaijan currently imprisons more journalists than at any point since it joined the European Union in 2001, according to human rights group Amnesty International. Since 2023, in rapid succession authorities detained 28 media workers from Abzas Media, Toplum TV, and Meydan TV, mostly on currency smuggling and money laundering, according to Bloss.
The U.S. helped Azerbaijan build itself into an oil-producing powerhouse, helping it extract Caspian Sea oil.
The U.S. provided equipment to help Azerbaijan prevent the smuggling of drugs, weapons of mass destruction and people, the U.S. embassy in Baku announced in 2022. Both Azerbaijan and the U.S. are also strategic partners in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. Azerbaijan worries about Iranian influence on its own Shia Muslims, Earle “Lee” Litzenberger, the U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan, said in an interview with CNS.
Human rights was once an issue the United States brought up from time to time. However, under the Trump administration, this issue is the least prioritized, Litzenberger said.
“Authorities in Azerbaijan are so well established and grounded themselves in the international and domestic political scene. They’ll get away with whatever they do, and are getting away with whatever they do,” Human Rights Watch researcher Arzu Geybulla said.
To silence journalists, the government has to make up charges, she said. “The evidence is not real evidence, The trials are sham trials. The evidence in the investigations was planted.”