ANAR MAMMADLI

About Anar Mammadli

Anar Mammadli, based in Baku, Azerbaijan, is a highly respected democracy and human rights defender and leader of Azerbaijan’s only independent election watchdog, the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Centre (EMDS). He has more than twenty years’ professional experience in election monitoring, good governance and the promotion of political rights in Azerbaijan and other post-Soviet countries. He is also a former – and current – political prisoner, yet steadfastly fights against authoritarian narratives.

Anar Mammadli was inspired towards involvement in human rights during his time as a student. There were over 700 political prisoners in Azerbaijan at the time – many of them young civil and political activists – yet Azerbaijan was simultaneously working to join the Council of Europe, which required improved legislation on electoral code, media law, freedom of expression and the release of political prisoners.

Anar graduated from the Azerbaijan University of Languages in Philology and from the Syracuse University (USA) in the Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA).

By 2003, Anar Mammadli had embarked on his mission of monitoring electoral processes. Despite knowing the risks for civil and political rights defenders in Azerbaijan, amidst a climate of growing repression, he established the EMDS, which mobilised over 1,000 domestic election observers across the country over the following years. Increasing bureaucratic obstacles and restrictions on NGO activity meant the EMDS’s official registration was revoked in 2008 (the organisation was then called the Election Monitoring Centre). Undeterred, he continued his work through a newly established version of EMDS, in contravention of repeated warnings from the government.

In 2013, shortly after the EMDS published a critical report on the recent Presidential elections, Anar Mammadli was arrested and jailed for a series of trumped-up charges. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) later ruled that his detention had been politically motivated, holding that he had been prosecuted only to silence and punish him for his election monitoring activities. In September 2014, while in prison, he was awarded the prestigious Václav Havel Human Rights Prize by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in honour of his outstanding contribution to civil society in the defence of human rights.

Anar Mammadli is widely connected internationally. He co-founded the European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE) in 2012, and collaborates with the Network of Human Rights Houses. In 2024, he co-founded the Climate of Justice Initiative ahead of COP29, to be held in Azerbaijan, with the aim of promoting civil liberties, public participation and environmental justice.

Spending two-and-a-half years as a political prisoner only strengthened Anar’s resolve to defend civil and political freedoms, bolstered by opinions that his imprisonment meant ongoing elections could not be free or fair. Knowing first-hand the benefit of support for political prisoners, he also aims to advocate for all those unjustly convicted – in Azerbaijan and abroad. Meanwhile, the political climate in Azerbaijan has continued to decline, with an intensified crackdown on fundamental human rights and an increase in politically motivated persecution of journalists, political opposition leaders, grassroots activists and defenders of human and environmental rights.