SEVINJ VAGIFGIZI ABBASOVA

About Sevinj Vagifgizi

Sevinj Vagifgizi (Abbasova) was born on 5 July 1989 in the Fuzuli district of Azerbaijan. She began her career as a reporter for the Gun Sahar newspaper while studying at the Faculty of Journalism of Baku State University. She later worked for the newspapers Bizim Yol and Azadlıq and the media organisation Meydan TV. Since September 2022, she has been the editor-in-chief of Abzas Media.

Her journalistic work has resulted in significant persecution. She has faced repeated detentions, a travel ban from 2015 to 2019 when she worked for Meydan TV, and was fined for filming election fraud during the 2018 presidential election in Azerbaijan. An investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) also revealed that her phone was among those secretly monitored by the government using Pegasus spyware. As editor-in-chief of Absaz Media, she has overseen numerous reports exposing corruption linked to President Ilham Aliyev’s family and other high-ranking officials.

Sevinj Vagifgizi was in Europe on a business trip when, on the morning of 20 November 2023, employees of the Main Police Department of Baku City arrested Ulvi Hasanli and initiated a criminal investigation against Abzas Media. Despite warnings to the contrary, she returned to Azerbaijan on 21 November; however, she was detained at the airport, and her home was searched the same night.

Being a journalist in Azerbaijan means that officials will react to your question in any way but actually answering it. They might threaten you, they might grab your camera and break it, they might leave your phone calls and requests unanswered or hang up on you. Or it might be worse.

 

Sevinj Vagifgizi
18 July 2021

Case description

With the arrest of Sevinj Vagifgizi and Ulvi Hasanli, the police raided the Abzas Media office, where authorities claimed to have found €40,000. Initially charged with smuggling under Article 206.3.2 of the Azerbaijani Criminal Code, Vagifgizi consistently denied the allegations, stating they were fabricated in retaliation for Abzas Media’s corruption investigations into high-ranking officials. The initial charge carried a potential sentence of up to eight years in prison.

During the investigation, the indictment was amended and included charges of illegal entrepreneurship, money laundering, and tax evasion. The trial, which was part of a broader case against multiple Abzas Media journalists, began at the Baku Court on  Grave Crimes in late 2024. On 20 June 2025, the court convicted Vagifgizi and sentenced her to nine years in prison.

Vagifgizi’s imprisonment has been marked by multiple concerns regarding her conditions in detention. She has faced harsh conditions, including a lack of heating in her cell, leaking water, and poor sanitation. During her trial, she and her colleagues refused to attend hearings, citing the degrading conditions they faced, such as being transported in overcrowded, smoke-filled vehicles. In protest of their treatment and the unjust transfer of their colleague Ulvi Hasanli to a remote prison, Vagifgizi and other female journalists began a hunger strike on 22 July 2025. Her mother reported that Vagifgizi was being deliberately subjected to pressure, including being denied clean clothes and personal items. She ended her hunger strike in late July after her parents’health, who suffer from cardiovascular diseases, deteriorated because of the stress. On 23 September 2025, Sevinj Vagifgizi was transferred to the correctional labour complex in the village of Gurumba in Lankaran, over 250 kilometres from Baku, which added burden for her family.

In a letter from prison, Vagifgizi herself addressed the crackdown in Azerbaijan on independent civil society and media, stating that the government fears the truth their reporting exposes and that she chose to return to Azerbaijan to stand in solidarity with her arrested colleagues.