The murder of Avaz Hafizli
He chained himself to the gate of the prosecutor's office for queer rights. Five months later he was dead.
On 22 February 2022, Avaz Hafizli was killed in the courtyard of his apartment building in Baku. The perpetrator was his own cousin. Hafizli was 24, a journalist with the online portal Kanal 13 and one of the best-known openly queer journalists in Azerbaijan.
The story began in the summer of 2021. An Instagram influencer spread videos in which she disparaged queer people, especially trans women, and demanded that they be removed from the country. Those targeted filed complaints. Nothing happened. A few weeks later, one of the trans women who had been attacked was found dead.
Hafizli refused to accept this. He helped organise a protest and, in September 2021, chained himself to the fence of the Prosecutor General's Office in Baku. This action, too, had no consequences. Instead, he himself became a target of the influencer, and his family turned away from him.
Five months later he was dead. The authorities initially spoke of a drunken quarrel. In court, the cousin then said he had killed Hafizli because of his homosexuality. He had urged him to turn away from "this path", and Hafizli had replied that it was his life. In July 2022, a court in Baku sentenced the perpetrator to nine and a half years in prison for intentional killing. A hate motive played no role in the verdict, although activists believe it would have significantly increased the sentence.
The case is typical of the situation in the country. On ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Index, Azerbaijan ranked last of 49 states at the time. Queer people report arrests, hate speech and violence, often from their own families. In the Council of Europe, members later raised the murder of Avaz Hafizli when discussing threats to journalists in Azerbaijan.