On April 18, 2026, a clock that should never have started ticking reaches 1,000 days. That is how long the Azerbaijani government has held my father, Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu — economist, professor, anti-corruption defender, opposition leader, and father — in a legal trap with no end in sight.
He has not been convicted of anything. He has not had a fair trial. He has simply been held, first in a detention center, now under house arrest, while his health deteriorates.
And when the regime could not break my father, they reached for the people he loves. A year ago, the government lodged bogus charges against my father’s younger brother, Galib Bayramov, too. He is chairman of a prominent economic think tank in Azerbaijan, and his next hearing – as in my father’s case, one of many in a never-ending effort to break or exhaust him – is scheduled for April 15.
The two cases are among a range of actions by the Azerbaijani government led by President Ilham Aliyev to suppress any opposition and, for that matter, any civil society that seeks to organize, however benignly, independent of the regime.
A Teacher Who Cannot Teach
To understand what these nearly 1,000 days since my father’s detention have meant, you have to understand who he is. He is not simply a political figure or an academic name on an international petition. He is a man who came from a family of teachers, who believed to his core that the greatest thing a person could do was to gather and share knowledge. That belief took him from Azerbaijan to research fellowships in Poland, Hungary, and in 2008, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He returned to Azerbaijan, then later won a Fulbright Scholarship for Duke University in North Carolina, returning home again before a stint at Princeton University, then later going on to Rutgers University in New Jersey, and most recently the London School of Economics and Political Science. At each step, he built a life and a career dedicated to exposing corruption and advocating for transparency, especially in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas sector. After Azerbaijan’s civil society crackdown in 2014, he became more involved in promoting the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) at the national, regional, and global levels. He represented civil society in the Eurasian region on the EITI Global Board from 2012 to 2019. In the meantime, he became the first chairperson of the Azerbaijan Democracy and Prosperity Movement, founded in 2015.
During his Rutgers days, I studied there, and I recall walking with my father from Highland Park across the bridge into New Brunswick and onto campus, sometimes with me skateboarding while he walked alongside me. Those were our moments. Even though I have lived in the United States since 2015, I miss Azerbaijan. Nobody thinks about moments like that until they are gone.
They have been gone since July 23, 2023.
In Legal Limbo, With a 17-Year Sword Hanging Over Him
On that day, approximately 20 plainclothes Azerbaijani police officers ran my father’s car off the road outside of Azerbaijan’s capital Baku. They physically assaulted him and my mother, Irada Bayramova, and arrested him on charges of counterfeit currency production and extremism charges that the U.S. State Department and human rights organizations across the world have called fabricated and politically motivated.
My mother was released. But my father was held for nine months in a pretrial detention facility, after which he was transferred to house arrest in July 2024, just 21 days before the expiration of the maximum time Azerbaijan’s authorities are allowed to hold someone in pretrial detention. His movement outside his home is severely restricted. As he told German diplomats at one point: “Since then, I have remained in legal limbo without a timely or fair trial. If convicted, I face up to 17 years in prison.”
No credible evidence has ever been presented against him. The European Parliament has passed multiple resolutions demanding his release. In April 2024, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken personally called Aliyev, pressing for my father’s “full, expeditious release.” Human Rights Watch has documented his case extensively. Bipartisan members of the U.S. Congress — including Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), and later Senators Tillis and Richard Durbin (D-IL) with Senate Resolution 398, and the similar House Resolution 120 — have all called for his release. The calls have gone unanswered.
A Life at Risk
What has changed most urgently in recent months is the state of my father’s health. He has long been denied adequate medical treatment for high blood pressure and diabetes. Now, he is suffering from a rapidly enlarging aortic root aneurysm accompanied by valve damage, a life-threatening cardiovascular condition that requires urgent surgical intervention. In his own words, “my life is at serious risk.”
The cruelty is in the details. Adequate treatment is not available to him inside Azerbaijan. Yet he remains under a strict travel ban and has been stripped of valid identity documents, cutting him off from banking services, medical insurance, and the ability to seek care abroad. He is required to report to a police station twice a week — a station located 35 kilometers from his home — simply to prove he has not left the country. He is not allowed to attend public gatherings. With few exceptions, he is not allowed to speak to the press. Visitors to his home are monitored and pressured.
The Azerbaijani government has not jailed him. It has constructed a cage around his entire life.
When One Man Won’t Break, They Go After His Brother
My father did not break. And so the government went after his family.
The beating during the original arrest left my mother with 30 percent of the right side of her body non-functional. The government responded with a statement claiming she had simply fallen. My family’s property, registered in my mother’s name, has since been confiscated.
And then came Galib. In March 2025, my father’s brother was summoned for questioning. On April 10, 2025, he was formally charged with money laundering and abuse of power, charges that carry 8 to 12 years in prison if convicted. The heart of the indictment? His organization’s cooperation with a German development program, between 2013 and 2021 — 13 years ago. It’s all part of a wider crackdown on international donors and their onetime grantees in Azerbaijan, as Human Rights Watch has documented.
Like my father, Galib, too, is under house arrest. Since October 2025, Galib has appeared before the Baku Court on Grave Crimes at hearing after hearing — October, November, December, January, February, March, now April. Sometimes hearings have had to be rescheduled because the prosecutors didn’t show up. Yet, every defense motion has been denied. The next hearing is scheduled for three days before the 1,000th day of my father’s detention, and we believe the timing is not a coincidence.
What the World Has Done – and What It Must Still Do
The international response to my father’s case has been, at times, genuinely encouraging — and ultimately insufficient.
The U.S. Senate introduced Senate Resolution 616 in March 2024, and then the above-referenced bipartisan statement in July 2024, followed by House Resolution 120 in February 2025 and Senate Resolution 398 in September 2025, each condemning my father’s treatment and urging his immediate release. Just this February, the Virginia congressional delegation wrote directly to Vice President JD Vance ahead of his trip to Azerbaijan, urging him to raise my father’s case with Aliyev’s government. The European Parliament’s multiple resolutions mentioned above called for his release and urged EU sanctions against Azerbaijani officials responsible for human rights violations, including the widespread repression of civil society.
Such statements are commendable, and my family and I are grateful for the moral support. Still, none of this activity has produced freedom.
What is needed now is consequences. Specifically, with President Donald Trump championing a peace process between Azerbaijan and Armenia and cultivating a relationship with Aliyev, that could present an opening to press for my father’s medical access and release in bilateral engagements. The EU should follow through on its repeated calls for sanctions under the Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime against the officials responsible. And both the United States and the EU should make clear that Azerbaijan’s international standing — its energy partnerships, its diplomatic relationships, its aspirations on the world stage (it hosted the annual global United Nations Climate Change Conference in November 2024, to the consternation of human rights activists) — cannot be decoupled from how it treats the people within its borders.
A Family’s Demand
I have spent almost 1,000 days navigating embassies, congressional offices, international courts, and newsrooms to raise awareness of my father’s case and press for his release. I have not stopped. I will not stop.
My father spoke the truth about corruption. He carried a pen, not a weapon. He just wanted to teach, to be able to conduct research freely and to speak freely in the classroom. After 1,000 days, that is still all he has ever wanted.
On this milestone, our demand is simple and non-negotiable: release Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu immediately and unconditionally. Allow him to travel abroad to receive the urgent medical care his life depends on. Drop all charges against him and his brother Galib. And to the international community — and Azerbaijan’s people — hold the Azerbaijani government accountable for what it has done to this family, and to the hundreds of other political prisoners it continues to hold behind the walls of a system designed to punish the truth.
