Bahruz Samadov is an Azerbaijani political scientist, peace activist, and PhD candidate at Charles University in Prague, or at least he was until the summer of 2024. On August 21, 2024, the State Security Service detained Samadov while he was visiting his grandmother in Baku. Global Voices reported on his arrest at the time, as part of a wider crackdown on critics before Azerbaijan hosted COP29 in November 2024.
Samadov was one of the few Azerbaijani voices to oppose the 2020 Karabakh war. In his writing for OC Media, Eurasianet and other outlets, he argued for dialogue with Armenia and criticized the expulsion of ethnic Armenians from Karabakh. Prosecutors charged him with high treason based on his WhatsApp exchanges with Armenian peace activists and on publicly available information. Samadov denied the charges and called himself a “prisoner of peace.” His lawyer argued that the prosecution’s theory of “indirect espionage” was vague and had no basis in case law.
On June 23, 2025, after a closed-door trial, the Baku Grave Crimes Court sentenced him to 15 years in prison. The Baku Court of Appeal upheld the verdict in September 2025, and the Supreme Court did the same in September 2026. Amnesty International, which considers him arbitrarily imprisoned, reports that he has been held in solitary confinement and denied medical care, and that he has twice attempted suicide, most recently in his Supreme Court hearing. Below, Global Voices publishes a letter Samadov wrote from prison and asked us to share.