About Abzas Media

Abzas Media

Abzas Media is an independent Azerbaijani online investigative outlet, founded in 2016 by a group of young civil society representatives, which investigates corruption, abuses of power, misuse of public resources and human rights violations. Published in Azerbaijani, it became the country's most prominent anti-corruption investigative newsroom — and, in November 2023, the first target of the crackdown that dismantled Azerbaijan's remaining independent press. Its director Ulvi Hasanli, editor-in-chief Sevinj Vagifgizi, deputy director Mahammad Kekalov and reporters Nargiz Absalamova, Elnara Gasimova and Hafiz Babali were arrested between November 2023 and January 2024, and on 20 June 2025 the Baku Court of Grave Crimes sentenced seven media workers in the case, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent Farid Mehralizada, to prison terms of seven and a half to nine years. The Supreme Court rejected their cassation appeals on 3 April 2026. Abzas Media continues to publish from exile.

The outlet's own account of why it was targeted is on the record: in a statement after Hasanli's arrest, Abzas Media attributed the raids to "a series of investigations into claims of corruption against the president and his appointed officials", and held President Ilham Aliyev responsible. International organisations — Amnesty International, the Council of Europe, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch and the Global Investigative Journalism Network, of which Abzas is a member — have condemned the case as politically motivated. This profile gives the documented facts of both the outlet's journalism and its prosecution.

Founding and mission

Abzas Media was founded in 2016, in response, as the People in Need foundation's Homo Homini Award citation records, to a wave of attacks on Azerbaijani civil society in 2014. Its founders were young civil society activists and journalists; Ulvi Hasanli, a human rights defender politically active since the mid-2000s who had chaired several youth organisations, co-founded the outlet and has served as its director since its inception. Its declared purpose was to report what state-controlled media ignore or suppress: corruption, misuse of public resources and human rights violations.

The outlet grew quickly through social media, where it built a large audience, and established itself as a specialist in investigative method rather than daily news. Its membership of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, the Global Forum for Media Development and, later, the Network of Exiled Media Outlets reflects that professional identity: Abzas is a nonprofit investigative newsroom, not a commercial portal, and its LinkedIn registration describes it in exactly those terms, as an award-winning independent Azerbaijani investigative media outlet now operating in exile.

Investigative reporting

Abzas Media's reputation rests on specific investigations. The Global Forum for Media Development's member spotlight cites its reporting on how a high-ranking Azerbaijani official acquired a multi-million property in France, and on a former son-in-law of President Aliyev receiving a major contract connected with hosting COP29 guests in Baku. A 2022 investigation found that companies belonging to powerful people, including President Aliyev's daughters, had been declared winners in non-transparent tenders for development projects in the territories in and around Nagorno-Karabakh regained by Azerbaijan. Its reporters also covered the environmental and health consequences of the Gedabek gold mine near Soyudlu, where pollution grievances had triggered protests — reporting, Amnesty notes, by Nargiz Absalamova into alleged corrupt deals by companies connected with government officials and into the mine's dangers.

The Free Media Awards citation adds the texture: state procurements in the reconstruction of destroyed Karabakh towns and villages, court cases, the struggles of marginalised groups and the political opposition, reported — the citation stresses — in consistent adherence to journalistic principles. Before the crackdown, Abzas's website was repeatedly cyber-attacked and its journalists harassed, reprisals its chroniclers connect directly to the corruption reporting.

The November 2023 arrests

The crackdown began on 20 November 2023. Masked police detained Ulvi Hasanli at his home as he prepared to travel to Moldova for an event; the same day, social entrepreneur and Abzas collaborator Mahammad Kekalov was detained at his home, his whereabouts unconfirmed by the authorities until 22 November. On 21 November, editor-in-chief Sevinj Vagifgizi was arrested as her flight landed at Baku's Heydar Aliyev International Airport. Police searched Hasanli's home and the Abzas office, announcing the discovery of 40,000 euros in cash in the office; Hasanli said the money was planted. Baku's Khatai District Court placed Hasanli and Vagifgizi in four months' pretrial detention on charges of smuggling by an organised group, which carries up to eight years.

The arrests continued: reporter Nargiz Absalamova on 30 November 2023; Hafiz Babali — editor of the economic department of the Turan Information Agency and a collaborator in the case — on 13 December; reporter Elnara Gasimova on 14 January 2024. Human Rights Watch, reporting the first arrests on 22 November 2023, called the charges spurious and dubious and the detentions punitive: "the latest illustrations of this longstanding pattern". The Abzas arrests opened the wider 2023–2025 wave that went on to Kanal 13, Toplum TV, Meydan TV and others, in which at least 110 people were questioned as witnesses in the connected cases alone.

Charges, trial and sentences

The prosecution's case, as documented by Amnesty International, the CPJ and court reporting, alleged that the journalists received illegal Western donor funding and smuggled money into Azerbaijan by prior conspiracy. In August 2024 the charges were expanded to include illegal entrepreneurship, money laundering, tax evasion, document forgery and related counts under eight articles of the Criminal Code. The journalists denied all charges and linked them to their professional work.

On 20 June 2025, the Baku Court of Grave Crimes convicted seven media workers in the case. Director Ulvi Hasanli, editor-in-chief Sevinj Vagifgizi and journalist Hafiz Babali received nine years each; reporters Nargiz Absalamova and Elnara Gasimova eight years each; project coordinator Mahammad Kekalov seven years and six months; and RFE/RL correspondent Farid Mehralizada, tried in the same case, nine years. Amnesty records the defendants held at the remote Lankaran Penitentiary Complex, far from their families in Baku. On 3 April 2026 the Supreme Court rejected the cassation appeals and upheld the convictions; the journalists' exiled acting leadership announced an intention to apply to the European Court of Human Rights. The CPJ condemned the April 2026 decision and called for the journalists' immediate release.

Continuing from exile

Abzas Media did not stop. In February 2024 the imprisoned editorial team appointed investigative journalist Leyla Mustafayeva as interim editor-in-chief, and a rebuilt team of exile-based journalists resumed publication from outside Azerbaijan; the outlet's acting director and editor-in-chief in exile, Gunel Safarova, speaks for it publicly. Its website is blocked inside Azerbaijan, yet the Global Investigative Journalism Network records that it continues to reach readers through mirror sites and social media — over a thousand active visits in a sampled week despite the block — with audiences of more than 117,000 followers on Facebook, 92,000 on Instagram and 63,000 subscribers on YouTube at the time of that account, and content viewed millions of times in 2026.

The imprisoned journalists themselves continue to contribute to public-interest journalism from prison, as the outlet's profiles record. And the work they were arrested for has been continued by others: in November 2023, fifteen recognised media institutions joined the Forbidden Stories consortium to pursue investigations Abzas had begun — the international mechanism by which silenced newsrooms' stories are completed anyway.

Recognition and international standing

Abzas Media's standing is documented by the honours of the press-freedom world. The outlet received the Homo Homini Award from People in Need, and the Free Media Awards 2024 honoured it for its corruption reporting; Sevinj Vagifgizi received the US Department of State's 2024 "Champions of Combating Corruption" award and was a laureate of the RSF Press Freedom Award, while Hafiz Babali had received the Gerd Bucerius Free Press of Eastern Europe Award in 2019. Amnesty International, the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Federation of Journalists have all campaigned on the case. For a directory, these facts matter: they establish that Abzas Media is not a marginal blog but one of the internationally recognised institutions of Azerbaijani journalism.

Place in Azerbaijan's media landscape

Abzas Media exemplifies the fate of independent journalism in Azerbaijan. The country once had opposition newspapers and a broadcast sector with critical voices; by the 2020s, as print collapsed and television consolidated under pro-government control, the remaining independent scrutiny came from a handful of online outlets. Of those, Abzas was the investigative specialist — the one that followed money to the presidential family's circle. The 2023–2025 crackdown that began with its arrests is recorded by Freedom House as imprisoning 25 journalists in total, and by OCCRP as an eighteen-month campaign erasing independent media; Azerbaijan stands at 167th of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders index in recent editions.

The outlet's own framing of its present mission, given to the Global Forum for Media Development, is that after the arrests its work is driven by solidarity as well as journalism: its journalists' imprisonment is itself the story of Azerbaijan's civic space, and continuing to publish is their answer to it.

Assessment

Abzas Media is the most consequential Azerbaijani online news outlet of its era measured by impact on the state that prosecuted it: a 2016-founded, Azerbaijani-language investigative nonprofit whose corruption reporting reached the president's family, whose entire senior staff is imprisoned on sentences of up to nine years that the international community regards as political, and which nonetheless continues to publish from exile with its imprisoned journalists' names on its masthead cause. WorldNM records it as an active but exiled outlet, its Baku operation suspended, its journalists' sentences upheld in April 2026 — and records, equally, that it has not been silenced.