Azerbaijani journalist Ahmad Mammadli sentenced to 6 years in prison

New York, March 19, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Azerbaijan to release journalist Ahmad Mammadli and credibly investigate claims that police severely mistreated him. A court in the capital, Baku, sentenced Mammadli on Monday to six years in prison on charges of hooliganism and causing serious bodily harm.

Mammadli denied the charges and said they had been fabricated in retaliation for the work of his outlet, Yoldash Media, one of the last independent media outlets that had continued to operate amid an ongoing wave of journalist arrests in Azerbaijan since 2023. He plans to appeal the sentence.

“Given the way Azerbaijan has jailed dozens of journalists on trumped-up charges in recent years, Ahmad Mammadli’s conviction seems highly dubious, and the police violence he is alleged to have suffered is utterly abhorrent,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Azerbaijan should release him immediately and not contest his appeal. As Europe and the U.S. continue to strengthen ties with Azerbaijan, they must demand that Azerbaijan stop its persecution of the press, unless they want to be seen to be condoning the kind of appalling abuse Mammadli says he suffered.”

The court convicted Mammadli over a May 2025 incident on the outskirts of Baku in which police alleged the journalist stabbed a man after a dispute in a taxi. 

According to copies of the indictment and the journalist’s defense speech shared with CPJ, Mammadli said he was in a shared taxi with strangers when one of the passengers, who he believes was a police agent, told the taxi to pull over, dragged the journalist out of the vehicle, and began beating him. Mammadli said that police officers arrived quickly on the scene, arrested him, and set up a fake crime scene, throwing a knife to the ground and cordoning off the area.

He said the officers then took him to a police station, where they beat him unconscious, knocking his tooth out with a baseball bat, and repeatedly electrocuted him to force him to provide his phone password and “the desired answers to their questions.”

Zafar Ahmadov, a local human rights defender who attended Mammadli’s trial, said that the journalist’s fingerprints were not found on the knife and no witnesses said they had seen Mammadli stab the man. Ahmadov said the case appeared to be similar to other recent cases in which government critics have been jailed on dubious stabbing allegations. 

Mammadli had been one of the last independent journalists covering political trials in Azerbaijan. He was arrested the same night as Ulviyya Ali, the most prominent journalist reporting on the same issue.

In CPJ’s latest prison census, Azerbaijan was ranked the sixth-worst jailer of journalists in the world, with at least 24 journalists behind bars in retaliation for their work.

CPJ emailed Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversees the police, for comment, but did not receive a reply.