A court in Baku sentenced four Azerbaijani citizens to prison terms of 18 months to two years on July 29 for promoting communist ideology and attempting to organize a march carrying Soviet flags. Theirs is the latest case in an escalating campaign against the political left in Azerbaijan.
Ibrahim Asadli and Abdulla Ibrahimli were each sentenced to two years in prison. Elchin Bayramli and Mehman Zeynalov each received 18-month terms. The verdict was delivered by the Nizami District Court in Baku.
All four were charged under Article 233 of Azerbaijan’s Criminal Code, which covers organizing or actively participating in actions that violate public order. Prosecutors said the men rented an office space in Baku where they held periodic meetings and recorded material promoting Marxist and communist ideas, distributed that material on social media, and attempted to organize a march through Baku carrying flags of the Soviet Union and the former Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs detained the four men in a Baku park in November 2025 after videos of the planned march circulated online and a court ordered them held in pretrial detention for three months. Their trial concluded with the prison sentences.
Communist parties and communist symbols are not formally banned in Azerbaijan. The Communist Party of Azerbaijan has been a legally registered political party since 1994, entitled to hold political education events, run candidates, and participate in elections. That the state instead pursued a public-order charge against these four men—rather than any law targeting communism directly—underscores, in the view of critics, that Azerbaijani authorities are using public-order statutes as a workaround to punish political dissent that isn’t technically illegal.
Human rights organizations have long described Azerbaijan’s government as a hereditary dictatorship built around the Aliyev family. Heydar Aliyev, a former chairman of the Azerbaijan SSR’s KGB and First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan under Soviet rule, became president of independent Azerbaijan in 1993. When he died in 2003, power passed to his son, Ilham Aliyev, who remains president today and chairs the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, an observer member of the Centrist Democrat International.
The Human Rights Foundation has described Aliyev as having essentially inherited his father’s throne and says the family’s grip on power now spans more than three decades, reinforced by a 2016 constitutional referendum that removed presidential term limits.
Elections are held in Azerbaijan, but international observers and human rights groups have repeatedly found them to fall short of free and fair standards. The country’s unicameral legislature, the Milli Majlis, is dominated by Aliyev’s New Azerbaijan Party, which holds 68 of 125 seats; independents, most of them aligned with the government, hold roughly 44.
This is not an isolated case. Azerbaijani authorities have arrested other activists in recent months over similar attempts to publicly display Soviet symbols, part of a wider crackdown that human rights advocates say treats communist political expression as a public-safety threat even though it remains formally legal.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
