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The Georgian government deported an Azerbaijani journalist, forcibly returning him to his home country despite an explicit interim ruling by Europe’s top human rights court designed to halt his transfer.
Afgan Sadigov, the editor-in-chief of the independent YouTube news channel Azel TV, fled to Georgia with his family following a severe crackdown on independent media and activists by the Azerbaijani government in December 2023. But his search for a safe haven unraveled after he published a Facebook post earlier this month criticizing Georgian law enforcement.
“Wherever there is a dictatorship, police officers are ready to sell and trample everything for a salary and a police uniform, and they do it with love, dedication, and pride,” Sadigov wrote.
He was detained on the night of April 4. The Georgian Interior Ministry later confirmed his deportation on Facebook, stating that Sadigov had been found guilty of insulting the police. A Georgian court handed him a 2,000 lari ($743) fine and a three-year ban on re-entering the country.
The swift deportation appears to be the culmination of a months-long, cross-border legal battle. In August 2024, Sadigov was arrested in Georgia on extortion charges levied by Azerbaijani authorities—accusations that he and his supporters have consistently dismissed as politically motivated.
A Georgian court initially ordered his extradition. However, Sadigov’s legal team successfully appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, which granted an injunction the following year to halt the transfer.
To justify the sudden April 5 deportation, the Georgian Interior Ministry stated it had learned “a few days ago” that Azerbaijani authorities had halted their prosecution of Sadigov on the extortion charges. Because the extradition request was theoretically dropped, Georgian authorities argued that the Strasbourg court’s injunction was no longer relevant.
Sadigov’s lawyer, Mariam Kvelashvili, vehemently rejected that legal maneuvering. Speaking to Monitori, the Georgia-based member center of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), she argued that even if local proceedings in Azerbaijan were terminated, the European court’s interim measure did not automatically expire.
“This is a kind of bypass—a formal bypass of the court's decision—and of course, the European court will evaluate this as a violation," Kvelashvili said. She emphasized that the ECHR “must deliberate separately on the termination or cancellation” of the order.
“Furthermore, nowhere in the interim measure document is it stated that this issue is tied to the completion of the extradition case; on the contrary, the transfer itself is prohibited,” she added.
The deportation has cast a chilling effect over the community of exiled dissidents in the Caucasus. Upon arriving in Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, Sadigov was briefly freed, quickly detained by police again, and then released once more, according to a Facebook post by his wife, Sevinj.
“In light of these events, there are sufficiently serious grounds for me to be concerned,” she wrote.
The Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics, a Tbilisi-based nongovernmental organization dedicated to media integrity, issued a public statement condemning the government’s actions and expressing solidarity with the expelled editor.
“The case of Afgan Sadygov shows how effectively authoritarian governments can cooperate against critically minded journalists to trample human rights and suppress freedom of expression,” the statement read.
The timing of the deportation has also raised intense geopolitical questions. The day after the journalist was handed over to Azerbaijani authorities, Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev and First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva arrived in Tbilisi for an official visit.
