Azerbaijan Used Ruben Vardanyan’s Funding of Schools, Kindergartens and Mass Weddings as Evidence of Criminal Activity
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The Azerbaijani court that sentenced Ruben Vardanyan to 20 years in prison tied him to killings, military operations and other events stretching back to the late 1980s, including incidents that occurred years before he moved to Nagorno-Karabakh, according to an Armenian human rights lawyer who reviewed the case.
Siranush Sahakyan, who represents the interests of Armenian prisoners before the European Court of Human Rights, detailed portions of the case Friday during a news conference in Yerevan. She argued that the evidence cited in the verdict does not establish Vardanyan’s personal involvement in many of the crimes attributed to him.
Her comments followed the publication of complete English translations of Vardanyan’s indictment and verdict on the Free Armenian Prisoners website. Together, the documents run 3,302 pages.
Vardanyan, an Armenian businessman and philanthropist, moved to Nagorno-Karabakh in 2022 and served as state minister of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic from November 2022 to February 2023. Azerbaijani authorities detained him in September 2023 as he attempted to leave the region following Azerbaijan’s military offensive.
An Azerbaijani military court sentenced Vardanyan to 20 years in prison in February 2026.
Sahakyan said the case reaches far beyond the period Vardanyan spent in Nagorno-Karabakh.
One charge cited by Sahakyan concerns fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan in September 2022. She said the case includes testimony from an Azerbaijani serviceman who told the court that a fellow soldier was killed and two others were wounded by Armenian artillery during the clashes. The serviceman asked the court to impose the harshest possible punishment on Vardanyan.
Sahakyan said the verdict does not explain how that testimony connects Vardanyan personally to the attack.
The case also links Vardanyan to events dating to the first Nagorno-Karabakh war, when he was living in Moscow, she said.
According to Sahakyan, Azerbaijani prosecutors argued that Vardanyan joined a “criminal association” and, through his alleged support and financing of armed groups, became responsible for crimes attributed to that organization.
The verdict then cites events covering several decades, including killings, hostage-taking, disappearances, landmine explosions and displacement, she said. It references periods stretching from 1988 to 2024 and alleges that 925 Azerbaijani settlements were occupied between 1988 and 1994, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and 18,850 people were intentionally killed between 1988 and 2024.
Sahakyan said prosecutors used that broader history to establish criminal responsibility without identifying Vardanyan’s individual role in the incidents.
She pointed to a similar issue involving events in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2021, before Vardanyan moved there.
Among the testimony cited in the case were accounts from people wounded by artillery fire in the Lachin region. Another victim described a landmine explosion involving a KamAZ truck that killed two journalists and a resident of Kelbajar and wounded four others. The witnesses called for Vardanyan to be punished.
Sahakyan said the testimony described the consequences of the incidents but did not establish that Vardanyan ordered, organized or participated in them.
The Azerbaijani case also scrutinized Vardanyan’s philanthropic work.
Sahakyan said prosecutors portrayed the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, which Vardanyan co-founded, as connected to terrorism-related activity and treated visits to Nagorno-Karabakh by some Aurora Prize laureates as evidence of participation in a criminal organization.
She highlighted the case of Mirza Dinnayi, a Yazidi humanitarian activist and Aurora Prize laureate who visited Nagorno-Karabakh. According to Sahakyan, Azerbaijani authorities characterized funds associated with Dinnayi’s award as financing mercenaries of Kurdish origin.
Projects supported by Vardanyan in Nagorno-Karabakh also appeared in the criminal case, Sahakyan said. They included financing for schools and kindergartens as well as support for the Great Artsakh Wedding, a mass wedding ceremony for couples in the region.
Sahakyan said those activities were presented as part of Vardanyan’s alleged criminal conduct.
His brief tenure as state minister was treated as a forcible seizure of power in violation of Azerbaijan’s Constitution, while his business and philanthropic activities were characterized as illegal entrepreneurship and financing of terrorism, she said. His arrival in Nagorno-Karabakh through the Lachin Corridor was also treated as an illegal border crossing.
Sahakyan said that despite the thousands of pages contained in the indictment and verdict, she found no specific order from Vardanyan directing the killing or torture of civilians, forced displacement or an attack against a civilian population.
She argued that the case instead relies heavily on allegations of collective responsibility, linking Vardanyan to decades of conflict through his later role in Nagorno-Karabakh and his financial and charitable activities there.
Vardanyan was detained alongside several former Nagorno-Karabakh officials after Azerbaijan regained control of the region in September 2023. The offensive was followed by the exodus of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.
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