Fighting Corruption: From Administrative Campaign to Institutional Reform

Ilham Aliyev on Feb. 23 signed into law the ratification of the “United Nations Convention against Cybercrime,” strengthening Azerbaijan’s legal framework for cross-border investigations of digital crimes and the exchange of electronic evidence.

In a case that has come to symbolize the consequences of the long-running conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azerbaijani military court on February 17 sentenced Armenian businessman and political figure Ruben Vardanyan to 20 years in prison on charges including crimes against peace and humanity, war crimes, terrorism, and financing terrorism.

The use of personal and intimate information as a weapon in political struggle is not new in Azerbaijan. What is new is the scale, speed and deniability introduced by artificial intelligence, which is rapidly eroding the boundary between fact and fabrication.

One year after a passenger jet operated by Azerbaijan Airlines fell from the sky near the Kazakh city of Aktau, killing 38 people, the preliminary investigation report published last week was expected to bring clarity. Instead, it has revealed a tangle of contradictions, omissions, and unresolved questions that risk deepening mistrust—not only among the victims’ families, but also between states already strained by the geopolitical context surrounding the disaster.