“If convicted, Vardanyan faces the grim prospect of life imprisonment,” read a statement released by his family and lawyer on Monday. “The new charges presented against Ruben Vardanyan fall under 20 different articles of Azerbaijan’s Criminal Code.”
“Illustrating the extent to which the regime is desperate to justify its ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and illegal imprisonment of its former leaders, the fabricated evidence is presented in more than 25,000 pages across 100 volumes, all written in Azeri,” the statement said, adding that its details are hidden from Vardanyan on “national security” grounds.
“This approach is clearly designed for [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev to justify holding a secret trial before a tribunal that will be neither independent nor impartial,” it quoted the American lawyer, Jared Genser, as saying. He described the charges as a “brazen attempt to blame everything that the Azeri regime did in Nagorno-Karabakh on Ruben.”
“We are afraid that we might not be able to see him again if the democratic world does not act to put an end to this nonsense,” Vardanyan’s son David said for his part.
Vardanyan, who held the second-highest post in Karabakh’s leadership from November 2022 to February 2023, was arrested at an Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor as he fled the region along with tens of thousands of its ordinary residents displaced by an Azerbaijani offensive. He was charged with “financing terrorism,” illegally entering Karabakh and supplying its armed forces with military equipment. He denies the accusations.
Vardanyan was reportedly put in a punishment cell in an Azerbaijani prison last April after he went on hunger strike to demand the immediate release of himself and seven other Karabakh Armenian leaders also jailed by Baku. In a subsequent appeal sent to the UN Committee against Torture, Vardanyan’s family and Genser said he was denied water, forced to stand for many hours and subjected to sleep deprivation.
Baku has denied the claims. It has barred Genser from visiting Azerbaijan and talking to his client.
The Armenian government maintains that it has been trying hard to have Vardanyan and at least 22 other Armenians remaining in Azerbaijani captivity freed. Its domestic critics dismiss these assurances. They say that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian actually helped Baku legitimize Vardanyan’s continuing imprisonment with his scathing comments about the tycoon.
Speaking at an August 31 news conference in Yerevan, Pashinian wondered who had told Vardanyan to renounce Russian citizenship and move to Karabakh in 2022 and “for what purpose.” He seemed to echo Azerbaijani leaders’ earlier claims that Vardanyan was dispatched to Karabakh by Moscow to serve Russian interests there.
Vardanyan hit back at Pashinian in a September statement issued from the Azerbaijani jail and publicized by his family. According to the latter, Azerbaijani interrogators asked the tycoon questions “in connection with” Pashinian’s comments.