For David Vardanyan, September 27, 2023 is a day he’ll never forget. It was the day he awoke to photos of his father, Russian-Armenian billionaire Ruben Vardanyan, in the custody of Azerbaijani security forces.

“It seems so long ago, more than 480 days already,” David says. “I found out about it on social media. At first, I was in complete disbelief that something like this could happen. And then I saw that these images had been posted very intentionally by Azerbaijani state media, to show every Armenian in the world that they’re no longer safe,” he says.

Ruben Vardanyan’s arrest came amidst the dramatic collapse and complete ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, the ethnic Armenian-populated breakaway enclave of Azerbaijan. A week earlier, Azerbaijan had launched a full-scale offensive to finally crush all resistance in the de facto independent territory, forcing a total capitulation by the republic in just 24 hours. What followed was the complete exodus of the territory’s population, with more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing their ancestral homeland in just days, as the Republic of Artsakh came to an end.

But not all would be allowed to leave. A number of individuals — mostly high-ranking Karabakh Armenian politicians — were detained as Azerbaijani forces took full control of the territory. These included three of the republic’s former presidents, as well as Vardanyan, who had moved to the territory in August 2022 and briefly served as its state minister. After more than a year of captivity, a series of trials against 16 of the detained, including Vardanyan, who faces life in prison, began on January 17. The proceedings to date have been extremely opaque, with only Azerbaijani state media allowed to cover them and no international observers present.

The charges against Vardanyan and others are “purely political”, says Irene Victoria Massimino, a lawyer and professor specialising in human rights and international criminal law.

“In the overall context of [Azerbaijan’s] persecution of Armenians, especially the Armenians of Artsakh, these charges are based only on politics. They are fabricated by Azerbaijan,” she says.

Massimino is one of four lawyers on whose behalf the Center for Truth and Justice, a California-based, Karabakh-focused advocacy organisation, has applied for visas to Azerbaijan to observe the trials. They have yet to receive a response from Baku, but it is unlikely to matter — Massimino says the chance of anything approximating justice resulting from the proceedings is “zero”.

“I tend to quote a lot the Freedom House report on Azerbaijan,” Massimino says. “The country scored seven points out of 100. It is absolutely unfree, and one of the main reasons for that in the most recent Freedom House report is the blockade of Artsakh [from December 2022 to September 2023] and the persecution of Armenians. So these are show trials. They are absolutely unfair and based on political charges,” she says.

While Azerbaijan, under the autocratic rule of President Ilham Aliyev, is no stranger to abrogations of justice, the nine-month Karabakh blockade was extraordinary even by Baku’s standards. More than 100,000 Karabakh Armenian citizens were brought to the brink of starvation by Azerbaijan’s closure of the only road linking the enclave with the outside world. When the International Court of Justice ordered in February 2023 that Baku open the road and ‘ensure unimpeded movement’ between Karabakh and Armenia, Azerbaijan summarily ignored it. No consequences followed, and the humanitarian situation would continue to worsen for another seven months before Baku launched its military offensive.

Amidst the blockade, one of the most public figures representing the people of Karabakh was Ruben Vardanyan. Vardanyan gave dozens of interviews for international media on the deteriorating conditions in Karabakh, drawing the ire of Azerbaijan, who targeted him repeatedly in scathing rhetorical attacks. His son believes that this advocacy was what led Baku to single him out.

“One statistic that kind of drives the point home is that during the three months when Dad was state minister [November 2022 to February 2023], he gave more interviews to Western media than all the presidents of Karabakh did for 30 years combined,” David Vardanyan says. “I think the level of attention that Dad brought to Nagorno-Karabakh after he decided to live there did not fit with Azerbaijan’s playbook. They had hoped that they would slowly make things unlivable there and force people out gradually — kind of a ‘quiet ethnic cleansing’ that the world will not notice. So it’s very clear that they were not happy with the kind of attention they were now getting to the injustices being done there,” David says.

Eventually, Baku got its opportunity to punish Ruben directly — an opportunity that the Azerbaijani government is clearly relishing. By holding such show trials against Ruben and his 15 compatriots, Azerbaijan is hoping to flex its muscles and intimidate both its neighbour, Armenia, and its own citizens, Massimino says.

“For Azerbaijan, this is a trophy — that they finally have the leaders of the Artsakh government, who were fighting for self-determination for so long,” she says. “This constant intimidation of Armenians is intended to show power, most likely as a political tool for negotiations [with Armenia]. But I also think that it’s embedded in the DNA of authoritarian regimes that they must apprehend individuals and punish them for daring to exercise their rights. There are many other political prisoners in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani political prisoners, who will also receive this message.” 

Despite the obvious lack of fairness or judicial due process in the trials, they have generated almost no international response to date. With the exception of a resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) calling for Azerbaijan to release both the detained Karabakh Armenian leaders and the many Armenian POWs held by Baku, there have been few, if any, statements by Western countries on the matter.

“The lack of any attention by the international community [to these trials] astonishes me,” Massimino says. “Both the ‘caviar diplomacy’ and energy resources of Azerbaijan, their oil and gas, contribute to this. They have strong ties with many European countries, and it’s also a conflict that has received much less attention than other conflicts since 2020. I don’t understand why the media has put so little attention on the blockade in particular. Nine months of blockade of an entire people, and no one paid attention.” 

David Vardanyan says that the lack of Western political pressure on Azerbaijan was sadly predictable.

“I think the EU is completely losing its credibility when [President of the European Commission Ursula] von der Leyen calls Azerbaijan a ‘reliable partner,’” he says. 

“And the UK in particular should be noted for its complicity and deals with SOCAR [Azerbaijan’s state oil company]. The UK has the largest leverage over Azerbaijan, as a lot of the Aliyev family’s personal wealth is invested in the UK. On the US side of things, the previous administration was terribly silent in the ethnic cleansing that took place, so I think the new administration has a challenge and an opportunity to kind of do much more,” Vardanyan says.

In the absence of meaningful international pressure, it seems clear that Azerbaijan will continue with the trials. Massimino says that tangible steps should be taken by Western countries in response.

“Beyond talking about the issue, [Western countries] should start to rethink their economic relations with this authoritarian regime,” Massimino says. “The level of impunity Azerbaijan has enjoyed is very, very high. So sanctions would be an option, maybe cutting some economic ties, in order to force the regime to release these prisoners, both the POWs and the former leaders,” she says.

For David Vardanyan, all that’s left is to hope — and to savour the few minutes a week he gets to speak with his father.

“When we speak with Dad now, we’re just trying to get as much information as possible — about his health, about what’s happened in the courtroom,” he says. “Azerbaijan has made the trial completely inaccessible; they are now even threatening to disbar the lawyer we found, with great difficulty, to represent him. They have refused all his petitions to extend the trial, to get internet access, anything that could let him prepare properly. They are getting away with complete disregard of international law and even their own laws. All we can do now is try to put this sham trial in the public eye as much as possible.”