During last autumn’s six-week war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the ethnic-Armenian majority enclave Nagorno-Karabakh, as Azerbaijani forces took control of areas in and around the region, they rounded up local civilians. Most younger civilians had fled the hostilities. Those remaining, with few exceptions, were older people who did not want to abandon their homes.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented several cases in which Azerbaijani forces used violence to detain civilians and subjected them to torture and inhuman and degrading conditions of detention. Two detainees died in Azerbaijani captivity; one of them, based on the evidence, was most likely the victim of an extrajudicial execution. Azerbaijani forces detained these civilians even though there was no evidence that they posed any security threat – they had no weapons and were not participating in the hostilities.
Here are the stories of the two detainees who died, via accounts from their close relatives who were taken into custody with them and also subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. To document these crimes, we interviewed two people who had been held in captivity and their family members, examined photo and video evidence provided by both the families and Armenia's Representative Office at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), reviewed medical documents, and spoke with lawyers representing the families.
