Farid Mehralizada, an economist and freelance journalist with the website of U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Azerbaijani service, has been behind bars since May 2024. He was sentenced in June 2025 to nine years in prison on multiple financial charges in relation to alleged receipt of Western donor funding.
He is one of at least 25 journalists and media workers imprisoned between late 2023 and August 2025 in a major crackdown on the independent press and civil society in Azerbaijan. Most of the journalists and media workers are being held in connection with alleged financial crimes linked to receiving illegal Western funding, amid a decline in relations between Azerbaijan and the West.
Around a dozen plainclothes and masked law enforcement officers reportedly seized Mehralizada from the streets of the capital, Baku, on May 30, 2024, placing a bag over his head and forcing him into a vehicle. The journalist’s wife, Nargiz Mukhtarova, told CPJ that her husband said the men struck him several times in the head and threatened to kill him. Later that day, police officers searched his home, where they confiscated his computer, cell phones, and car.
On June 1, a Baku court remanded Mehralizada into pretrial detention as part of a currency smuggling case against anti-corruption investigative outlet Abzas Media, six of whose journalists had previously been arrested. Both Abzas Media and Mehralizada denied that he worked for the outlet.
On October 30, RFE/RL issued a statement calling for the release of Mehralizada, whose work for the outlet was published without attribution for his safety.
Mehralizada covered economic topics for RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani service, Radio Azadliq, which is blocked in Azerbaijan and has operated from exile since a 2014 police raid on its Baku office. Mukhtarova told CPJ that she believes her husband was detained for his journalism and for independent media interviews criticizing government policy.
In August, authorities brought seven new economic crime charges against Mehralizada and the Abzas Media journalists, increasing the maximum prison sentence to 12 years.
Azerbaijani law requires civil society groups to obtain state approval for foreign grants, which authorities accuse Abzas Media and other outlets of failing to do.
In rulings on similar cases, the European Court of Human Rights stressed that such an omission was punishable under Azerbaijani law by fines, not criminal sanctions. Independent experts say that authorities refuse to register independent organizations seeking foreign grants, making it impossible to legally receive them.
On June 20, 2025, a court sentenced Mehralizada to nine years in prison; it also sentenced the six Abzas Media journalists to between 7 1/2 and nine years. RFE/RL condemned Mehralizada’s sentence as a “sham” and “unnecessarily cruel.”
“I understand very well that the verdict you will read out will not be the verdict of the judges, but the verdict of those who have ordered our incarceration,” the journalist said in his closing speech in court.
On September 9, a Baku court upheld the sentences against Mehralizada and the Abzas Media journalists.
As of August 2025, Mehralizada was being held at Umbaki Penitentiary Complex, around 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Baku. Deniz Yuksel, advocacy manager for RFE/RL, told CPJ that he does not have any health issues.
CPJ emailed the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Office of the Prosecutor General, and the office of Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev for comment in August 2025, but did not receive any replies.