Avaz Hafizli
He chained himself to the prosecutor’s office to demand protection for queer people – five months later, his own cousin killed him.
Avaz Hafizli was a journalist with the online channel Kanal 13 in Baku and one of the best-known openly queer journalists in Azerbaijan. He reported on LGBT rights, took part in protests against a restrictive media law and against discrimination, and raised the rainbow flag in front of the presidential administration. Because his family put pressure on him over his sexuality, he moved into a rented flat.
In the summer of 2021 an Instagram influencer spread videos in which she called for violence against gay men and trans women and demanded they be driven out of the country. Complaints achieved nothing. A few weeks later, a trans woman who had been targeted was found dead. Hafizli helped organise a protest and in September 2021 chained himself to the fence of the Prosecutor General’s Office in Baku. He told the police that his life was in danger and that relatives were threatening him.
On 22 February 2022 his cousin attacked him in the courtyard of his building and killed him with a knife. Hafizli was 24. The police and doctors who came to the scene reportedly refused to touch his body, so his friends had to take it to the morgue.
In court the cousin said he had killed Hafizli because of his homosexuality. In July 2022 he was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison; a hate motive played no role in the verdict. Members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe later raised the murder in a resolution on threats to journalists in Azerbaijan.