“This is not a trial but an ethno-political vendetta against the past and future of the Armenian people,” Davit Babayan said in an audio message communicated to his family in Armenia by phone and made public on Thursday.

“All humanitarian, legal and international norms and their own legislation are being grossly violated,” he charged. “I call on fellow patriotic Armenians to unite and defend our rights because we are going appeal to the international court.”

Eight former Karabakh Armenian leaders were captured right after the 2023 Azerbaijani offensive that restored Baku’s full control over Karabakh and forced the region’s Armenian population to flee to Armenia. They all denied a long list of war crimes charges levelled against them. An Azerbaijani military court sentenced five of them, including Babayan, to life imprisonment and gave the three others 20-year jail sentences in February this year at the end of two trials denounced by Amnesty International as a “travesty.”

Babayan said that his appeal against the verdict filed later in February “disappeared” and did not reach a higher Azerbaijani court. He suggested that the authorities in Baku are deliberately preventing him from appealing to an international tribunal, presumably the European Court of Human Rights.

Babayan, who had served as Karabakh’s foreign minister, is the third Karabakh Armenian prisoner to have made a statement from the Azerbaijani prison. Ruben Vardanyan, who is also a prominent Armenian businessman, has done so on a regular basis.

In his most recent statement issued last week, Vardanyan stepped up his accusations that Armenia’s government is indifferent to the fate of the prisoners. He also criticized Armenia’s human rights ombudswoman, Anahit Manasian, for essentially dismissing his earlier appeal to try to visit the prisoners together with their relatives.

Earlier in May, another former Karabakh leader held in Baku, Davit Ishkhanian, urged Armenians to stay “strong” while decrying “blatant violations” of human rights and international law which he said occurred during the trials.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and other Armenian officials insist that Yerevan has been doing its best to try to secure the release of at least 19 Armenians remaining in Azerbaijani captivity. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev again branded them as “war criminals” when he addressed on May 4 a European Political Community summit in Yerevan via video link. Pashinian did not respond to Aliyev, drawing strong criticism from the Armenian opposition.

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