Elnara Gasimova, a reporter for anti-corruption investigative outlet Abzas Media, has been detained since January 2024. In June 2025, she was sentenced to eight years in prison on multiple financial charges in relation to alleged receipt of Western donor funding.
Gasimova is one of at least 25 journalists and media workers jailed between late 2023 and August 2025 in a major crackdown on the independent press and civil society in Azerbaijan.
In November and December 2023, police in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, arrested five Abzas Media journalists — director Ulvi Hasanli, project coordinator Mahammad Kekalov, chief editor Sevinj Vagifgizi, and reporters Nargiz Absalamova and Hafiz Babali. A court ordered all five to be held in pretrial detention on charges of conspiring to smuggle a large sum of money into the country, after police claimed to find $40,000 during a search of the outlet’s office.
On November 28, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the U.S., German, and French envoys and accused their embassies and organizations registered in those countries of illegally funding Abzas Media.
On January 13, 2024, Baku police summoned Gasimova for questioning in the Abzas Media case and arrested her. Two days later, a court remanded her into pretrial detention on the same currency smuggling charges.
Abzas Media is one of three major outlets — along with Toplum TV and Meydan TV — from among Azerbaijan’s last remaining independent media targeted over alleged receipt of Western donor money since late 2023. The crackdown has been linked to a decline in Azerbaijani-Western relations and a surge in Azerbaijani authoritarianism following the country’s military recapture of the Nagorno-Karabakh region in September 2023.
Gasimova and her colleagues have denied the charges. A statement issued by Abzas Media said the charges were retaliation by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev for “a series of investigations into the corruption crimes committed by the president of the country and his appointed officials.”
In August 2024, authorities brought seven new economic crime charges against the Abzas journalists, including money laundering and tax evasion, increasing the maximum prison sentence to up to 12 years.
On June 20, 2025, a court sentenced Gasimova to eight years in prison and her colleagues to between 7.5 and nine years. As the verdicts were read out, Abzas Media journalists turned their backs on the judges and held up posters of the outlet’s corruption investigations into senior officials, including the president’s family.
On September 9, a Baku court upheld the sentences against Gasimova and the other journalists jailed in the Abzas Media case.
As of September 2025, Gasimova remains at the Baku Pretrial Detention Center, pending her transfer to prison after the rejection of her appeal. Gasimova and her colleagues have repeatedly reported ill-treatment after complaining about jail conditions and other rights violations and undertook a five-day hunger strike in July 2025 in protest.
CPJ emailed the Penitentiary Service of Azerbaijan for comment in August 2025, but did not receive a reply.