On 5 February 2026, a court inside the Baku Judicial Complex found the elected leadership of a republic it had erased guilty on every count. The trial of the former Republic of Artsakh leaders had run for just over a year, behind closed doors, in a purpose-built courtroom. By the time it ended, three former presidents and an acting head of state were among the convicted, and five men faced the rest of their lives in an Azerbaijani prison.
Who stood in the dock
Sixteen defendants were tried together at the Baku Military Court. Among them were the men who had led Nagorno-Karabakh across nearly three decades: Arkadi Ghukasyan, president from 1997 to 2007; Bako Sahakyan, president from 2007 to 2020; Arayik Harutyunyan, president from 2020 to 2023; and Davit Ishkhanyan, the National Assembly speaker who served as acting president. This was not a prosecution of individuals. It was a prosecution of the institution they represented.
The charges were sweeping. The defendants faced more than 20 articles of Azerbaijan's Criminal Code, including "waging an aggressive war," "extermination of the population," and "violent seizure of power." Ruben Vardanyan, the Russian-Armenian billionaire who served as Artsakh State Minister from November 2022 to February 2023, was tried in separate proceedings, charged with "financing terrorism," creating "illegal armed groups," and "illegally crossing the border of Azerbaijan."
Caught at the checkpoint
The arrests came in a tight sequence in the autumn of 2023, at the Lachin corridor checkpoint, as the leaders moved toward Armenia during Azerbaijan's expulsion of the Karabakh Armenians. Vardanyan was detained on 27 September 2023. David Babayan surrendered the next day. David Manukyan and Levon Mnatsakanyan were taken on 29 September. Ghukasyan, Sahakyan and Ishkhanyan were detained on 2 October, and Harutyunyan on 3 October. Men leaving a homeland they could no longer hold were stopped at the one road out and taken into the custody of the state that had driven them from it.
The context of that road matters. When Azerbaijan installed the Lachin checkpoint in 2023, it said the checkpoint could be used to detain around 400 wanted Armenians, and it did not make the list public. International Crisis Group analyst Olesya Vartanyan assessed the reach of that ambition plainly: "Arrests with linkages to the past wars, local army or the [Karabakh] government would qualify almost all local men for detentions."
A trial no one was allowed to see
What happened next is, by design, difficult to verify. The hearings were held behind closed doors in a purpose-built courtroom. Information about the proceedings was disseminated only by Azerbaijan's state news agency, AZERTAC. International observers and foreign media were denied access. The defendants were represented exclusively by Azerbaijani lawyers. Many details of the trial simply cannot be checked, because the trial was built so that they could not be.
That structure drew sustained criticism. Human rights groups and European political institutions challenged the fairness of the proceedings, warned of the potential for torture in custody, and the trial has been characterized as politically motivated. Separately, international organizations and experts have characterized Azerbaijan's blockade and expulsion of the Karabakh Armenians as ethnic cleansing or genocide, the very event during which these leaders were seized.
On 5 February 2026, the court found all defendants guilty. Arayik Harutyunyan, David Babayan, Davit Ishkhanyan, Levon Mnatsakanyan and David Manukyan were each sentenced to life imprisonment. We do not assert that these verdicts are legally valid or legally invalid. We report the documented fact of the convictions, and the documented criticism of the process that produced them: closed doors, a single state source, no foreign observers, and lawyers chosen only from the prosecuting state.
The men left off the lists
The convictions do not sit in isolation. In our companion reporting, drawn from OC Media, we documented that 19 Armenians remain held in Azerbaijan, a group that includes the former Karabakh leadership. The same reporting noted that a detainee-release list Armenia's NSS chief reportedly handed Baku in September 2025 pointedly excluded that former leadership. And the draft peace treaty under discussion would have Armenia withdraw its cases before international courts.
Read together, the picture is stark. The international accountability cases that might have tested Azerbaijan's conduct are slated to be dropped. The diplomacy meant to bring detainees home was structured to leave these particular men behind. And in the gap left by both, Baku convicted the entire elected leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh in a courtroom no outsider could enter.
What this means, and what we are not claiming
This is OWL analysis, and we mark it as such. Armenia is pursuing a treaty that drops the international cases and whose detainee diplomacy left these very leaders off the lists, while Baku has convicted them all behind closed doors. We are not claiming the court's verdicts are legally valid, and we are not claiming they are legally invalid. We are not stating any defendant's guilt or innocence as fact. What we are documenting is a process that human rights groups and European institutions called politically motivated, and a parallel diplomacy that appears to have written these men out of the very negotiations that might have freed them.
So we put the question to our readers rather than a verdict. What does a state owe the leaders it elected, when it is no longer fighting for them, and when the only court still hearing their case is the one belonging to the power that drove them out?
Sources: Wikipedia, "Trial of former Republic of Artsakh leaders," for the Baku Military Court venue and dates (trial opened 17 January 2025, verdict 5 February 2026), the 16 defendants and the named former presidents Arkadi Ghukasyan (1997-2007), Bako Sahakyan (2007-2020) and Arayik Harutyunyan (2020-2023) plus acting president Davit Ishkhanyan, the 20-plus Criminal Code articles including "waging an aggressive war," "extermination of the population" and "violent seizure of power," Ruben Vardanyan's separate proceedings and his charges of "financing terrorism," creating "illegal armed groups" and "illegally crossing the border of Azerbaijan," the September-October 2023 arrests at the Lachin corridor checkpoint, the closed-door AZERTAC-only proceedings with foreign media and observers denied access and Azerbaijani-only defence counsel, the fair-trial criticism and warnings of torture, and the 5 February 2026 life sentences for Harutyunyan, Babayan, Ishkhanyan, Mnatsakanyan and Manukyan; the same source for International Crisis Group analyst Olesya Vartanyan's quoted assessment that "Arrests with linkages to the past wars, local army or the [Karabakh] government would qualify almost all local men for detentions." OWL's companion investigation "A Walk in Dilijan," sourced to OC Media, for the 19 Armenians still held in Azerbaijan including the former leadership, the September 2025 NSS release list that excluded that leadership, and the draft treaty provision withdrawing Armenia's international-court cases. OWL analysis: the "who benefits" framing in the closing section, linking Armenia's treaty and detainee diplomacy to Baku's convictions, is our interpretation and is labelled as such. We do NOT claim that the court's verdicts are legally valid or invalid, and we do NOT state any defendant's guilt or innocence as fact; we report the documented convictions and the documented criticisms of the closed process that produced them.